
iMAT 




Class U CnGO 

Book .p 4 ?^r 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSm 





OAJAJ^-C&y 



', ii^^au/^ 



ORATIONS 



AND 



After-Dinner Speeches 



OF 



CHAUNCEY M^DEPEW 



uO:^^«/fi/ 



. s^ ,/ 



NEW YORK 

THE CASSELL PUBLISHING CO. 
31 East 17TH St. (Union Square) 



c\iS^)b;:} 



Copyright, 1896, by 
THE CASSELL PUBLISHING CO. 

All rights reserved. 






THE MERSHON COMPANY PRESS, 
RAHWAY, N. J. 



PUBLISHERS' NOTE. 



The present volume, containing an authorized selec- 
tion of fifty-two representative Orations and After- 
Dinner Speeches by Mr. Chauncey M. Depew, has been 
compiled and edited by Mr. Joseph B. Gilder, editor 
of The Critic, and revised by Mr. Depew himself. The 
selection has been made from several hundred addresses, 
delivered in various parts of the country, and indicates 
very fully the wide range of topics to which the orator 
has turned his attention during the past twenty-five 
years, and the versatility of his treatment of questions 
of every degree of gravity and importance. 



CONTENTS. 



PAGE 



I.-Oration on the Site of Federal Hall, New York City, on the 
One Hundredth Anniversary of the Inauguration of 
President Washington, April 30. 1889, - _ . j 

II.— The Political Mission of the United States.— Oration at 
the Celebration of the Birthday of Washington, by the 
Union League Club of Chicago, at Central Music Hall, 
Chicago, February 22, 1888, -.._.-- 

III.— Oration at the Unveiling of the Bartholdi Statue of 
Liberty Enlightening the World, New York Harbor, 
October 28, 1886, - -64 

IV.— Speech at the One Hundred and Nineteenth Annual Ban- 
quet of the Chamber of Commerce of the State of New 
York, November 15, 1887, ----- 82 

v.— Speech at the Dinner given to the Hon. Justin McCarthy, 
M.P., at the Hoffman House, New York, October 2, 1886, 
by the Irish Parliamentary Fund Association, - - 91 

Vl.-Speech at the Dinner given by Members of the Union 
League to the Hon. John Jay, on the Occasion of his 
Seventieth Birthdaj', June 24, 1887, - - - . 99 

VII.-Address delivered at Kingston, July 30, 1877, at the 
Centennial Celebration of the Formation of the State 
Government of the State of New York. - - .103 

3 



< 



PAGE 



iv CONTENTS. 

Vlll.-Oration at the Academy of Music, New York, on ^^ 
Decoration Day, May 30, 1879, ----- ^25 

IX.-Oration at the Reunion of the Army of the Potomac, ^ 

atSaratoga.Eveningof June 22, 1887, - - -^49 

X -Speech at the Banquet given on March 16, 1886, by the 
Members of the Union League Club of 1863 and 1864. 
to Commemorate the Departure for the Seat of War of 
the Twentieth Regiment of United States Colored ^ 
Troops, Raised by the Club, - - " " " ^59 

XI -Speech at the Dinner to Celebrate the Anniversary of 

the Birth of General Grant, at Delmonico's, April 27, 

- 166 
1888, -----■" 

XII -Address at the Memorial Service of President James 

A. Garfield, by the Grand Army of the Republic, at 
Chickering Hall, New York, September 26, 1881, - - 175 

XIII -Address at the Memorial Service by the Legislature 

of the State of New York, for President Chester A. 
Arthur, in the Assembly Chamber, at Albany, Wednes- ^^^ 
dayEvening, April 20, 1887, - - " ' 

XIV -Address at the Memorial Service by the Legislature of 

the State of New York, for Governor Reuben E. Fenton. 
in the Capitol at Albany, April 27. 1887. - " ' '99 
XV -Address at the Unveiling of the Statue of Alexander 
Hamilton in Central Park, New York, November 22, 

- 220 
1880, ----■" 

XVI -Oration at the Centennial Celebration of the Capture 
■ of Major Andre, at Tarrytown, N. Y., September 23, 

_ . - 231 
1880, - - - - 



CONTENTS. V 

FAGB 

XVII. — Addresses before the New England Society of the 
City of New York : 

1. December 22, 1865, in Response to the Toast, 

" Woman," ---_.__ 257 

2. December 22, 1879, in Response to the Toast, " The 

State of New York," ------ 261 

3. December 22, 1880, in Response to the Toast, "The 

City of New York," ------ 266 

4. December 22, 1882, in Response to the Toast, "The 

Half-Moon and the Mayflower," - - - - 272 

5. December 22, 1884, in Response to the Toast, "The 

State of New York," ------ 277 

XVIII. — Speech at the Sixth Annual Festival of the New 
England Society of Pennsylvania, at the Continental 
Hotel, Philadelphia, December 22, 1886, in Reply to the 
Toast, " The New Netherlanders, the Pilgrim Fathers 
of Manhattan," ------ . 283 

XIX. — Address before the Chamber of Commerce May 10, 
1881, in Response to the Toast, " The State of New 
York," --------- 293 

XX. — Speech at the Banquet given by the Republican Club 
of the City of New York, at Delmonico's, February 12, 
1887, in Response to the Sentiment, "The Young 
Men in Politics," - 301 

XXI. — Speech at the Lotos Club's Reception to Henry M. 

Stanley, November 27, 1886, ----- 309 

XXII. — Speech at the Lotos Club's Reception to George 

Augustus Sala, January 10, 1885, - . . . 314 



Vi CONTENTS. 

PAGE 

XXIII.— Speech at the Lotos Club's Reception to Henry 

Irving, October 27, 1883, - ----- 319 

XXIV.— Speech at the Dinner at Delmonico's to Celebrate 
Yale's Victories in Athletic Contests, February 16, 
1889, --------- 324 

XXV. — Address as Chairman of the Alumni Meeting, in 
Alumni Hall, Yale College, at the Commencement, 
June 25, 1886, - 330 

XXVI.— Speech at the Dinner at Delmonico's, given by Yale 
Alumni to President Noah Porter, on the Occasion of 
hisRetirement, January 23, 1886, - - - - 337 

XXVII.— Speech at the Semi-Centennial Anniversary of the 
St. Nicholas Society of the City of New York, February 
28, 1885, --------- 344 

XXVIII.— Speech at the First Annual Dinner of the Hol- 
land Society of New York, at the Hotel Brunswick, 
January 8, 1886, 355 

XXIX. — Address at the Dedication of the Monument of the 
New York Press Club, at Cypress Hills Cemetery, June 
12, 1887, 361 

XXX.— The Liberty of the Press— Address before the New 
York State Press Association at the Madison Square 
Theatre, New York, June 19, 1883, - - - - 367 

XXXI.— A Talk to Young Physicians— Address to the 
Graduating Class of the Syracuse Medical College. 
June 14, 1888, - - - 386 



CONTENTS. Vll 

PAGE 

XXXII.— Address at the Tenth Annual Meeting of the 
Board of Management of the Bank Clerks' Mutual 
Benefit Association of the City of New York, December 
3,1878, --------- 400 

XXXIII. — Address at the Laying of the Corner-stone of the 
College Building given by William H. Vanderbilt 
to the College of Physicians and Surgeons, April 24, 
1886, --------- 412 

XXXIV.— Address before the Graduating Class of the 
Columbia College Law School, at the Academy of 
Music, New York, May 17, 1882, - - - - 421 

XXXV. — Address at the Eighteenth Anniversary of the 
Working- Women's Protective Union, Chickering Hall, 
New York, February 6, 1882, ----- 437 

XXXVI. — Address before the Annual Convention of the 
Psi Upsilon Societies of the Various Colleges in the 
United States, held at Syracuse, May 10, 188 1, - 449 

XXXVII. — Address at the Opening of the New Building of 

the New York Produce Exchange, May 6, 1884, - 466 

XXXVIII.— Address at the Complimentary Banquet, given 
by the Alumni Association of Packard's Business Col- 
lege, at Delmonico's, June 2, 1883, - - - - 477 

XXXIX. —Address on the Tenth Anniversary of the Organiza- 
tion of the Railroad Branch of the Young Men's Chris- 
tian Association of New York, January 4, 1887, - 482 

XL. — Washington Irving, the Father of American Literature — 
An Address before the Irving Club of Tarrj'town, New 
York, April 16,1887. ------ 494 



viii CONTENTS. 



PAGE 



XLI.— From a Speech before the College Republican Cam- 
paign Club of Princeton, New Jersey, October 3, 1884, %o^ 

XLII.— The Friendships of Politics— From a Speech at the 
Dinner given by State Senator McCarthy to the Senate 
of New York, February 20, 1884, - - - - 508 

XLIII.-Speech at the Dinner given to Southern Governors 

' by the Southern Society of New York, May 2, 1889, 5" 

XLIV.— An Interview with Emperor William. Aug. 12, 1886. SH 

XLV.— Withdrawal from the Presidential Race— Speech at the 
Republican National Convention at Chicago. June 22, 
1888. - - - - 516 

XLVI.-Reply to Friends who Greeted Him in New York Bay 

on his Return from Europe, September 13, 1888, - 518 

XLVII.— The Christian Faith —Reply to John Fiske at a 

Meeting of the Nineteenth Century Club. March 3. 1 886. 522 

XLVl II. —Argument by Chauncey M. Depew before the 
United States Senate Committee, January 11, 1890. 
on the Quadri-Centennial Celebration, - - - S^A. 



o 



I. 

RATION ON THE SiTE OF FEDERAL HaLL, NEW 

York City, on the One Hundredth Anni- 
versary OF THE InAUCxURATION OF PRESIDENT 

Washington, April 30, 1889. 



We celebrate to-day the Centenary of our Nation- 
ality. One hundred years ago the United States be- 
gan their existence. The powers of government were 
assumed by the people of the Republic, and they be- 
came the sole source of authority. The solemn cere- 
monial of the first inauguration, the reverent oath of 
Washington, the acclaim of the multitude greeting 
their President, marked the most unique event of 
modern times in the development of free institutions. 

The occasion was not an accident, but a result. It 
was the culmination of the working out by mighty 
forces through many centuries of the problem of self- 
government. It was not the triumph of a system, the 
application of a theory, or the reduction to practice of 
the abstractions of philosophy. The time, the coun- 
try, the heredity and environment of the people, and 
the folly of its enemies, and the noble courage of its 
friends, gave to liberty, after ages of defeat, of trial, of 
experiment, of partial success and substantial gains, 
this immortal victory. Henceforth it had a refuge and 



2 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

recruiting station. The oppressed found free homes 
in this favored land, and invisible armies marched from 
it by mail and telegraph, by speech and song, by pre- 
cept and example, to regenerate the world. 

Puritans in New England, Dutchmen in New York, 
Catholics in Maryland, Huguenots in South Carolina, 
had felt the fires of persecution and were wedded to 
religious liberty. They had been purified in the fur- 
nace, and in high debate and on bloody battle-fields 
had learned to sacrifice all material interests and to 
peril their lives for human rights. The principles of 
constitutional government had been impressed upon 
them by hundreds of years of struggle, and for each 
principle they could point to the grave of an ancestor 
whose death attested the ferocity of the fight and the 
value of the concession wrung from arbitrary power. 
They knew the limitations of authority; they could 
pledge their lives and fortunes to resist encroachments 
upon their rights; but it required the lesson of Indian 
massacres, the invasion of the armies of France from 
Canada, the tyranny of the British Crown, the seven 
years' war of the Revolution, and the five years of chaos 
of the Confederation, to evolve the idea upon which 
rest the power and permanency of the Republic, that 
liberty and union are one and inseparable. 

The traditions and experience of the colonists had 
made them alert to discover, and quick to resist, any 
peril to their liberties. Above all things, they feared 
and distrusted power. The town meeting and the 
colonial legislature gave them confidence in themselves, 
and courage to check the royal governors. Their 
interests, hopes, and affections were in their several 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. 3 

commonwealths, and each blow by the British Minis- 
try at their freedom, each attack upon their rights as 
EngHshmen, weakened their love for the Motherland 
and intensified their hostility to the Crown. But the 
same causes which broke down their allegiance to the 
Central Government increased their confidence in their 
respective colonies, and their faith in liberty was large- 
ly dependent upon the maintenance of the sovereignty 
of their several States. The farmer's shot at Lexing- 
ton echoed round the world ; the spirit which it awak- 
ened from its slumbers could do and dare and die ; but 
it had not yet discovered the secret of the permanence 
and progress of free institutions. Patrick Henry thun- 
dered in the Virginia convention; James Otis spoke 
with trumpet tongue and fervid eloquence for united 
action in Massachusetts ; Hamilton, Jay, and Clinton 
plegded New York to respond with men and money 
for the common cause ; but their vision only saw a 
league of independent colonies. The veil was not yet 
drawn from before the vista of population and power, 
of empire and hberty, which would open with National 
Union. 

The Continental Congress partially grasped, but com- 
pletely expressed, the central idea of the American 
Republic. More fully than any other that ever assem- 
bled did it represent the victories won from arbitrary 
power for human rights. In the New World it was 
the conservator of liberties secured through centuries 
of struggle in the Old. Among the delegates were the 
descendants of the men who had stood in the brilliant 
array upon the field of Runnymede, which wrested 
from King John Magna Charta, that great charter of 



4 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

liberty, to which Hallam, in the nineteenth century, 
bears witness "that all which has been since obtained 
is little more than a confirmation or commentary." 
There were the grandchildren of the statesmen who 
had summoned Charles before Parliament and com- 
pelled his assent to the Petition of Rights which trans- 
ferred power from the Crown to the Commons, and 
gave representative government to the English-speak- 
ing race. And there were those who had sprung from 
the iron soldiers who had fought and charged with 
Cromwell at Naseby and Dunbar and Marston Moor. 
Among its members were Huguenots, whose fathers 
had followed the White Plume of Henry of Navarre, 
and in an age of bigotry, intolerance, and the deifica- 
tion of absolutism, had secured the great edict of relig- 
ious liberty from French despotism, and who had be- 
come a people without a country, rather than surrender 
their convictions and forswear their consciences. In 
this Congress were those whose ancestors were the 
countrymen of William of Orange, the Beggars of the 
Sea, who had survived the cruelties of Alva and broken 
the yoke of proud Philip of Spain, and who had two 
centuries before made a declaration of independence 
and formed a federal union which were models of free- 
dom and strength. 

These men were not revolutionists, they were the 
heirs and the guardians of the priceless treasures of 
mankind. The British King and his Ministers were 
the revolutionists. They were reactionaries, seeking 
arbitrarily to turn back the hands upon the dial of 
time. A year of doubt and debate, the baptism of 
blood upon the battle-fields, where soldiers from every 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. 5 

colony fought, under a common standard, and consoli- 
dated the Continental Army, gradually lifted the soul 
and understanding of this immortal Congress to the 
sublime declaration: "We, therefore, the representa- 
tives of the United States of America, in General Con- 
gress assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of 
the World for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in 
the name and by the authority of the good people of 
these colonies, solemnly publish and declare that 
these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, 
free and independent States." 

To this Declaration John Hancock, proscribed and 
threatened with death, af^xed a signature which has 
stood for a century like the pointers to the North Star 
in the firmament of freedom, and Charles Carroll, taunt- 
ed that, among many Carrolls, he, the richest man in 
America, might escape, added description and identifi- 
cation with "of Carrollton." Benjamin Harrison, a 
delegate from Virginia, the ancestor of the distin- 
guished statesman and soldier who to-day so worthily 
fills the chair of Washington, voiced the unalterable 
determination and defiance of the Congress. He seized 
John Hancock, upon whose head a price was set, in 
his arms, and placing him in the Presidential chair, 
said: "We will show Mother Britain how little we 
care for her, by making our President a Massachusetts 
man, whom she has excluded from pardon by public 
proclamation"; and when they were signing the Decla- 
ration, and the slender Elbridge Gerry uttered the grim 
pleasantry, "We must hang together, or surely we will 
hang separately," the portly Harrison responded with 
the more daring humor, "It will be all over with me in 



o ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

a moment ; but you will be kicking in the air half an 
hour after I am gone." Thus flashed athwart the great 
Charter, which was to be for its signers a death-warrant 
or a diploma of immortality, as with firm hand, high 
purpose, and undaunted resolution, they subscribed 
their names, this mockery of fear and the penalties of 
treason. 

The grand central idea of the Declaration of Inde- 
pendence was the sovereignty of the People. It relied 
for original power, not upon States or colonies, or their 
citizens as such, but recognized as the authority for 
nationality the revolutionary rights of the people of the 
United States. It stated with marvelous clearness the 
encroachments upon liberties which threatened their 
suppression and justified revolt, but it was inspired by 
the very genius of freedom, and the prophetic possi- 
bilities of united commonwealths covering the conti- 
nent in one harmonious republic, when it made the 
people of the thirteen colonies all Americans, and de- 
volved upon them to administer by themselves and for 
themselves the prerogatives and powers wrested from 
Crown and Parliament. It condensed Magna Charta, 
the Petition of Rights, the great body of English liber- 
ties embodied in the common law and accumulated in 
the decisions of the courts, the statutes of the realm, 
and an undisputed though unwritten Constitution ; 
but this original principle and dynamic force of the 
people's power sprang from these old seeds planted in 
the virgin soil of the New World. 

More clearly than any statesman of the period did 
Thomas Jefferson grasp and divine the possibilities of 
popular government. He caught and crystallized the 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. 7 

spirit of free institutions. His philosophical mind was 
singularly free from the power of precedents or the 
chains of prejudice. He had an unquestioning and 
abiding faith in the people, which was accepted by but 
few of his compatriots. Upon his famous axiom, of the 
equality of all men before the law, he constructed his 
system. It was the trip-hammer essential for the emer- 
gency to break the links binding the colonies to im- 
perial authority, and to pulverize the privileges of 
caste. It inspired him to write the Declaration of 
Independence, and persuaded him to doubt the wis- 
dom of the powers concentrated in the Constitution. 
In his passionate love of liberty he became intensely 
jealous of authority. He destroyed the substance of 
royal prerogative, but never emerged from its shadow. 
He would have the States as the guardians of popular 
rights, and the barriers against centralization, and he 
saw in the growing power of the nation ever-increasing 
encroachments upon the rights of the people. For the 
success of the pure democracy which must precede 
presidents and cabinets and congresses, it was perhaps 
providential that its apostle never believed a great 
people could grant and still retain, could give and at 
will reclaim, could delegate and yet firmly hold, the 
authority which ultimately created the power of their 
Republic and enlarged the scope of their own liberty. 

Where this master-mind halted, all stood still. The 
necessity for a permanent union was apparent; but 
each State must have hold upon the bowstring which 
encircled its throat. It was admitted that union gave 
the machinery required to successfully fight the com- 
mon enemy ; but yet there was fear that it might be- 



8 OR A TIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

come a Frankenstein and destroy its creators. Thus 
patriotism and fear, difficulties of communication be- 
tween distant communities, and the intense growth of 
provincial pride and interests, led this Congress to 
frame the Articles of Confederation, happily termed 
the League of Friendship. The result was not a gov- 
ernment, but a ghost. By this scheme the American 
people were ignored and the Declaration of Indepen- 
dence reversed. The States, by their legislatures, 
elected delegates to Congress, and the delegate repre- 
sented the sovereignty of his commonwealth. 

All the States had an equal voice without regard to 
their size or population. It required the vote of nine 
States to pass any bill, and f^ve could block the wheels 
of Government. Congress had none of the powers 
essential to sovereignty. It could neither levy taxes 
nor impose duties nor collect excise. For the support 
of the army and navy, for the purposes of war, for the 
preservation of its own functions, it could only call 
upon the States, but it possessed no power to enforce 
its demands. It had no president or executive au- 
thority, no supreme court with general jurisdiction, and 
no national power. Each of the thirteen States had 
seaports and levied discriminating duties against the 
others, and could also tax and thus prohibit interstate 
commerce across its territory. Had the Confedera- 
tion been a Union instead of a League, it could have 
raised and equipped three times the number of men 
contributed by reluctant States, and conquered inde- 
pendence without foreign assistance. This paralyzed 
Government-without strength, because it could not 
enforce its decrees; without credit, because it could 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEIV. 9 

pledge nothing for the payment of its debts; without 
respect, because without inherent authority — would, by 
its feeble life and early death, have added another to 
the historic tragedies which have in many lands marked 
the suppression of freedom, had it not been saved by 
the intelligent, inherited, and invincible understanding 
of liberty by the people, and the genius and patriotism 
of their leaders. 

But while the perils of war had given temporary 
strength to the Confederation, peace developed its 
fatal weakness. It derived no authority from the 
people, and could not appeal to them. Anarchy 
threatened its existence at home, and contempt met its 
representatives abroad. 

"Can you fulfill or enforce the obligations of the 
treaty on your part if we sign one with you?" was the 
sneer of the courts of the Old World to our ambassa- 
dors. Some States gave a half-hearted support to its 
demands; others defied them. The loss of public 
credit was speedily followed by universal bankruptcy. 
The wildest phantasies assumed the force of serious 
measures for the relief of the general distress. States 
• passed exclusive and hostile laws against each other, 
and riot and disorder threatened the disentegration of 
society. "Our stock is stolen, our houses are plun- 
dered, our farms are raided," cried a delegate in the 
Massachusetts convention ; " despotism is better than 
anarchy !" To raise four millions of dollars a year was 
beyond the resources of the Government, and three 
hundred thousand was the limit of the loan it could 
secure from the money-lenders of Europe. Even Wash- 
ington exclaimed in despair: "I see one head gradually 



lO ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

changing into thirteen ; I see one army gradually branch- 
ing into thirteen ; which, instead of looking up to Con- 
gress as the supreme controlling power, are considering 
themselves as depending on their respective States." 
And later, when independence had been won, the impo- 
tency of the Government wrung from him the excla- 
mation : "After gloriously and successfully contending 
against the usurpation of Great Britain, we may fall a 
prey to our own folly and disputes," 

But even through this Cimmerian darkness shot a 
flame which illumined the coming century, and kept 
bright the beacon-fires of liberty. The architects of 
constitutional freedom formed their institutions with 
wisdom which forecasted the future. They may not 
have understood at first the whole truth ; but, for that 
which they knew, they had the martyrs' spirit and the 
crusaders' enthusiasm. Though the Confederation was 
a government of checks without balances, and of pur- 
pose without power, the statesmen who guided it dem- 
onstrated often the resistless force of great souls ani- 
mated by the purest patriotism; and, united in judg- 
ment and effort to promote the common good, by 
lofty appeals and high reasoning, to elevate the masses- 
above local greed and apparent self-interest to their 
own broad plane. 

The most significant triumph of these moral and 
intellectual forces was that which secured the assent of 
the States to the limitation of their boundaries, to the 
■grant of the wilderness beyond them to the General 
Government, and to the insertion in the ordinance 
erecting the Northwest Territory of the immortal 
proviso prohibiting "slavery or involuntary servitude" 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. tt 

within all that broad domain. The States carved out 
of this splendid concession were not sovereignties 
which had successfully rebelled, but they were the 
children of the Union, born of the covenant and thrilled 
with its life and liberty. They became the bulwarks 
of nationality and the buttresses of freedom. Their 
preponderating strength f^rst checked and then broke 
the slave power; their fervid loyalty halted and held 
at bay the spirit of State rights and secession for gener- 
ations; and when the crisis came, it was ivith their 
overwhelming assistance that the nation killed and 
buried its enemy. The corner-stone of the edifice 
whose centenary we are celebrating was the Ordinance 
of 1787. It was constructed by the feeblest of con- 
gresses, but few enactments of ancient or modern times 
have had more far-reaching and beneficent influence. 
It is one of the sublimest paradoxes of history, that 
this weak Confederation of States should have welded 
the chain against which, after seventy-four years of fret- 
ful efforts for release, its own spirit frantically dashed 
and died. 

The government of the Republic by a Congress of 
States, a diplomatic convention of the ambassadors of 
petty commonwealths, after seven years' trial, was fall- 
mg asunder. Threatened with civil war among its 
members, insurrection and lawlessness rife within the 
States, foreign commerce ruined and internal trade 
paralyzed, its currency worthless, its merchants bank- 
rupt, its farms mortgaged, its markets closed, its labor 
unemployed, it was like a helpless wreck upon the 
ocean, tossed about by the tides and ready to be en- 
gulfed in the storm. Washington gave the warning 



12 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

and called for action. It was a voice accustomed to 
command, but not entreat. The veterans of the war 
and the statesmen of the Revolution stepped to the 
front. The patriotism which had been misled, but had 
never faltered, rose above the interests of the States 
and the jealousies of jarring confederates to find the 
basis for union. "It is clear to me as A B C," said 
Washington, "that an extension of federal powers 
would make us one of the most happy, wealthy, re- 
spectable, and powerful nations that ever inhabited 
the terrestrial globe. Without them we shall soon be 
everything which is the direct reverse. I predict the 
worst consequences from a half-starved, limping govern- 
ment, always moving upon crutches and tottering at 
every step." The response of the country was the 
Convention of 1787, at Philadelphia. The Declaration 
of Independence was but the vestibule of the temple 
which this illustrious assembly erected. With no suc- 
cessful precedents to guide, it auspiciously worked out 
the problem of constitutional government, and of im- 
perial power and home rule supplementing each other 
in promoting the grandeur of the nation and preserv- 
ing the liberty of the individual. 

The deliberations of great councils have vitally af- 
fected, at different periods, the history of the world and 
the fate of empires ; but this Congress builded, upon 
popular sovereignty, institutions broad enough to em- 
brace the continent, and elastic enough to fit all condi- 
tions of race and traditions. The experience of a hun- 
dred years has demonstrated for us the perfection of the 
work for defense against foreign foes, and for self-preser- 
vation against domestic insurrection, for limitless expan- 



CHAUNCRV M. DEPEW. 13 

sion in population and material development, and for 
steady growth in intellectual freedom and force. Its 
continuing influence upon the welfare and destiny of 
the human race can only be measured by the capacity of 
man to cultivate and enjoy the boundless opportunities 
of liberty and law. The eloquent characterization of 
Mr. Gladstone condenses its merits: "The American 
Constitution is the most wonderful work ever struck off 
at a given time by the brain and purpose of man." 

The statesmen who composed this great senate were 
equal to their trust. Their conclusions were the result 
of calm debate and wise concession. Their character 
and abilities were so pure and great as to command the 
confidence of the country for the reversal of the policy 
of the independence of the State of the power of the 
General Government, which had hitherto been the 
invariable practice and almost universal opinion, and 
for the adoption of the idea of the nation and its 
supremacy. 

Towering in majesty and influence above them all 
stood Washington, their President. Beside him was 
the venerable Franklin, who, though eighty-one years 
of age, brought to the deliberations of the Convention 
the unimpaired vigor and resources of the wisest brain, 
the most hopeful philosophy, and the largest experi- 
ence of the times. Oliver Ellsworth, afterward Chief- 
Justice of the United States, and the profoundest jurist 
in the country; Robert Morris, the wonderful financier 
of the Revolution, and Gouverneur Morris, the most 
versatile genius of his period ; Roger Sherman, one of 
the most eminent of the signers of the Declaration of 
Independence, and John Rutledge, Rufus King, El- 



14 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

bridge Gerry, Edmund Randolph, and the Pinckneys, 
were leaders of unequaled patriotism, courage, ability 
and learning; while Alexander Hamilton and James 
Madison, as original thinkers and constructive states- 
men, rank among the immortal few whose opinions 
have for ages guided ministers of state, and determined 
the destinies of nations. 

This great Convention keenly felt, and with devout 
and serene intelligence met, its tremendous responsi- 
bilities. It had the moral support of the few whose 
aspirations for liberty had been inspired or renewed 
by the triumph of the American Revolution, and the 
active hostility of every government in the world. 

There were no examples to follow, and the experience 
of its members led part of them to lean toward absolute 
centralization as the only refuge from the anarchy of the 
Confederation, while the rest clung to the sovereignty 
of the States, for fear that the concentration of power 
would end in the absorption of liberty. The large 
States did not want to surrender the advantage of their 
position, and the smaller States saw the danger to their 
existence. The Leagues of the Greek cities had ended 
in loss of freedom, tyranny, conquest, and destruction. 
Roman conquest and assimilation had strewn the shores 
of time with the wrecks of empires, and plunged civili- 
zation into the perils and horrors of the Dark Ages. 
The government of Cromwell was the isolated power 
of the mightiest man of his age, without popular au- 
thority to fill his place or the hereditary principle to 
protect his successor. 

The past furnished no light for our state-builders; 
the present was full of doubt and despair. The future, 



CitAU^CEY M. DEPEW. 15 

the experiment of self-government, the perpetuity and 
development of freedom, almost the destiny of mankind, 
was in their hands. 

At this crisis the courage and confidence needed to 
originate a system weakened. The temporizing spirit 
of compromise seized the Convention, with the alluring- 
proposition of not proceeding faster than the people 
could be educated to follow. The cry, "Let us not waste 
our labor upon conclusions which will not be adopted, 
but amend and adjourn," was assuming startling unani- 
mity. But the supreme force and majestic sense of 
Washington brought the assemblage to the lofty plane 
of its duty and opportunity. He said: "It is too 
probable that no plan we propose will be adopted. 
Perhaps another dreadful conflict is to be sustained. 
If to please the people we offer what we ourselves dis- 
approve, how can we afterward defend our work? Let 
us raise a standard to which the wise and honest can 
repair; the event is in the hands of God." 'T am the 
State," said Louis XIV. ; but his line ended in the 
grave of absolutism. "Forty centuries look down upon 
you," was Napoleon's address to his army, in the 
shadow of the Pyramids; but his soldiers saw the 
dream of Eastern Empire vanish in blood. Statesmen 
and parliamentary leaders have sunk into oblivion, or 
led their party to defeat, by surrendering their convic- 
tions to the passing passions of the hour ; but Washing- 
ton, in this immortal speech, struck the keynote of 
representative obligation, and propounded the funda- 
mental principle of the purity and perpetuity of consti- 
tutional government. 

Freed from the limitations of its environment, and 



i6 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

the question of the adoption of its work, the Conven- 
tion erected its government upon the eternal founda- 
tions of the power of the people. 

It dismissed the delusive theory of a compact be- 
tween independent States, and derived national power 
from the people of the United States. It broke up the 
machinery of the Confederation, and put in practical 
operation the glittering generalities of the Declaration 
of Independence. From chaos came order, from inse- 
curity came safety, from disintegration and civil war 
came law and liberty, with the principle proclaimed in 
the preamble of the great charter: "We, the people of 
the United States, in order to form a more perfect 
union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquillity, 
provide for the common defense, promote the general 
welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves 
and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Consti- 
tution for the United States." With a wisdom inspired 
of God, to work out upon this continent the liberty of 
man, they solved the problem of the ages by blending, 
and yet preserving, local self-government with national 
authority, and the rights of the States with the majesty 
and power of the Republic. The government of the 
States, under the Articles of the Confederation, became 
bankrupt because it could not raise four millions of dol- 
lars; the government of the Union, under the Consti- 
tution of the United States, raised six thousand mill- 
ions of dollars, its credit growing firmer as its power 
and resources were demonstrated. The Congress of 
the Confederation fled from a regiment, which it could 
not pay; the Congress of the Union reviewed the com- 
rades of a million of its victorious soldiers, saluting as 



CHAUNC^Y M. DEPEW. t^ 

they marched the flag of the nation whose supremacy 
they had sustained. The promises of the Confederacy 
were the scoff of its States; the pledge of the Repub- 
Hc was the honor of its people. 

The Constitution, which was to be strengthened by 
the strain of a century, to be a mighty conqueror with- 
out a subject province, to triumphantly survive the 
greatest of civil wars without the confiscation of an es- 
tate or the execution of a political offender, to create 
and grant home rule and state sovereignty to twenty- 
nine additional commonwealths, and yet enlarge its 
scope and broaden its power, and to make the name of 
an American citizen a title of honor throughout the 
world, came complete from the great Convention to the 
people for adoption. As Hancock rose from his seat 
in the old Congress, eleven years before, to sign the 
Declaration of Independence, Franklin saw emblazoned 
on the back of the President's chair the sun partly 
above the horizon, but it seemed setting in a blood-red 
sky. During the seven years of the Confederation he 
had gathered no hope from the glittering emblem, but 
now as with clear vision he beheld fixed upon eternal 
foundations the enduring structure of constitutional 
liberty, pointing to the sign, he forgot his eighty-two 
years, and, with the enthusiasm of youth, electrified 
the Convention with the declaration: "Now I know 
that it is the rising sun." 

The pride of the States and the ambition of their 
leaders, sectional jealousies and the overwhelming dis- 
trust of centralized power, were all arrayed against the 
adoption of the Constitution. North Carolina and 
Rhode Island refused to join the Union until long after 



iS ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OE 

Washington's inauguration. For months New York 
was debatable ground. Her territory, extending from 
the sea to the lakes, made her the keystone of the arch. 
Had Arnold's treason in the Revolution not been 
foiled by the capture of Andre, England would have 
held New York and subjugated the colonies; and in 
this crisis, unless New York assented, a hostile and 
powerful commonwealth dividing the States made the 
Union impossible. 

Success was due to confidence in Washington and 
the genius of Alexander Hamilton. Jefferson was the 
inspiration of Independence, but Hamilton was the in- 
carnation of the Constitution. In no age or country 
has there appeared a more precocious or amazing intelli- 
gence than Hamilton's. At seventeen he annihilated 
the President of his college, upon the question of rights 
of the colonies, in a series of anonymous articles which 
were credited to the ablest men in the country ; at 
forty-seven, when he died, his briefs had become the 
law of the land, and his fiscal system was, and after a 
hundred years remains, the rule and policy of our 
Government. He gave life to the corpse of national 
credit, and the strength for self-preservation and aggres- 
sive power to the Federal Union. Both as an expoun- 
der of the principles and an administrator of the affairs 
of the Government he stands supreme and unrivaled 
in American history. His eloquence was so magnetic, 
his language so clear, and his reasoning so irresistible, 
that he swayed with equal ease popular assemblies, 
grave senates, and learned judges. He captured the 
people of the whole country for the Constitution by 
his papers in The Federalist, and conquered the hostile 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEVV. 19 

majority in the New York Convention by the splendor 
of his oratory. 

But the multitudes whom no argument could con- 
vince, who saw in the executive power and centralized 
force of the Constitution, under another name, the 
dreaded usurpation of king and ministry, were satisfied 
only with the assurance, "Washington will be Presi- 
dent." "Good," cried John Lamb, the able leader of 
the Sons of Liberty, as he dropped his opposition ; 
"for to no other mortal would I trust authority so enor- 
mous." "Washington will be President," was the battle- 
cry of the Constitution. It quieted alarm, and gave 
confidence to the timid and courage to the weak. 

The country responded with enthusiastic unanimity, 
but the Chief with the greatest reluctance. In the su- 
preme moment of victory, when the world expected 
him to follow the precedents of the past, and perpetu- 
ate the power a grateful country would willingly have 
left in his hands, he had resigned and retired to Mount 
Vernon to enjoy in private station his well-earned rest. 
The Convention created by his exertions to prevent, 
as he said, "the decline of our federal dignity into 
insignificant and wretched fragments of empire," had 
called him to preside over its deliberations. Its work 
made possible the realization of his hope that "we might 
survive as an independent republic," and again he 
sought the seclusion of his home. But after the 
triumph of war, and the formation of the Constitution, 
came the third and final crisis; the initial movements 
of governmient which were to teach the infant state the 
steadier steps of empire. 

He alone could stay assault and inspire confidence 



20 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

while the great and complicated machinery of organ- 
ized government was put in order and set in motion. 
Doubt existed nowhere except in his modest and 
unambitious heart. "My movements to the chair of 
government," he said, "will be accompanied with feel- 
ings not unlike those of a culprit who is going to the 
place of his execution. So unwilling am I, in the even- 
ing of life, nearly consumed in public cares, to quit a 
peaceful abode for an ocean of difficulties, without that 
competency of political skill, abilities, and inclination, 
which are necessary to manage the helm." His whole 
life had been spent in repeated sacrifices for his coun- 
try's welfare, and he did not hesitate now, though there 
is an undertone of inexpressible sadness in this entry 
in his diary on the night of his departure : 

"About ten o'clock I bade adieu to Mount Vernon, 
to private life, and to domestic felicity, and with a 
mind oppressed with more anxious and painful sensa- 
tions than I have words to express, set out for New 
York with the best disposition to render service to my 
country in obedience to its call, but with less hope of 
answering its expectations." 

No conqueror was ever accorded such a triumph, no 
ruler ever received such a welcome. In this memorable 
march of six days to the Capitol, it was the pride of 
States to accompany him with the masses of their people 
to their borders, that the citizens of the next common- 
wealth might escort him through its territory. It was 
the glory of cities to receive him with every civic honor at 
their gates, and entertain him as the saviour of their lib- 
erties. He rode under triumphal arches from which chil- 
dren lowered laurel wreaths upon his brow. The road- 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEIV. 21 

ways were strewn with flowers, and as they were crushed 
beneath his horse's hoofs, their sweet incense wafted 
to Heaven the ever-ascending prayers of his loving 
countrymen for his life and safety. The swelling an- 
them of gratitude and reverence greeted and followed 
him along the country-side and through the crowded 
streets: "Long live George Washington ! Long live 
the Father of his People !" 

His entry into New York was worthy the city and 
State. He was met by the chief officers of the retiring 
Government of the country, by the Governor of the 
commonwealth, and the whole population. This su- 
perb harbor was alive with fleets and flags; and the 
ships of other nations, with salutes from their guns, and 
the cheers of their crews, added to the joyous acclaim. 

But as the captains, who had asked the privilege, 
bending proudly to their oars, rowed the President's 
barge swiftly through these inspiring scenes, Washing- 
ton's mind and heart were full of reminiscence and fore- 
boding. 

He had visited New York thirty-three years before, 
also in the month of April, in the full perfection of his 
early manhood, fresh from Braddock's bloody field, 
and wearing the only laurels of the battle, bearing the 
prophetic blessing of the venerable President Davies, 
of Princeton College, as "That heroic youth, Colonel 
Washington, whom I cannot but hope Providence has 
hitherto preserved in so signal a manner for some im- 
portant service to the country." It was a fair daugh- 
ter of our State whose smiles allured him here, and 
whose coy confession that her heart was another's re- 
corded his only failure, and saddened his departure. 



2 2 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

Twenty years passed, and he stood before the New 
York Congress, on this very spot, the unanimously 
chosen Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army, 
urging the people to more vigorous measures, and made 
painfully aware of the increased desperation of the 
struggle, from the aid to be given to the enemy by do- 
mestic sympathizers, when he knew that the same local 
military company which escorted him was to perform 
the like service tor the British Governor Tryon on his 
landing on the morrow. Returning for the defense of 
the city the next summer, he executed the retreat from 
Long Island, which secured from Frederick the Great 
the opinion that a great commander had appeared, 
and at Harlem Heights he won the first American vic- 
tory of the Revolution, which gave that confidence to 
our raw recruits against the famous veterans of Europe 
which carried our army triumphantly through the war. 
Six years more of untold sufferings, of freezing and 
starving camps, of marches over the snow by bare- 
footed soldiers to heroic attack and splendid victory, 
of despair with an unpaid army, and of hope from the 
generous assistance of France, and peace had come and 
Independence triumphed. As the last soldier of the 
invading enemy embarks, Washington at the head of 
the patriot host enters the city, receives the welcome 
and gratitude of its people, and in the tavern which 
faces us across the way, in silence more eloquent than 
speech, and with tears which choke the words, he bids 
farewell forever to his companions in arms. Such were 
the crowding memories of the past suggested to Wash- 
ington in 1789 by his approach to New York. But the 
future had none of the splendor of precedent and brill- 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. 23 

lance of promise which have since attended the inagu- 
ration of our Presidents. An untried scheme, adopted 
mainly because its administration was to be confided to 
him, was to be put in practice. He knew that he was 
to be met at every step of constitutional progress by 
factions temporarily hushed into unanimity by the ter- 
rific force of the tidal wave which was bearing him to 
the President's seat, but fiercely hostile upon questions 
affecting every power of nationality and the existence 
of the Federal Government. 

Washington was never dramatic, but on great occa- 
sions he not only rose to the full ideal of the event, he 
became himself the event. One hundred years ago to- 
day the procession of foreign ambassadors, of states- 
men and generals, of civic societies and military com- 
panies, which escorted him, marched from Franklin 
Square to Pearl Street, through Pearl to Broad to this 
spot ; but the people saw only Washington. As he 
stood upon the steps of the old Government Building 
here, the thought must have occurred to him that it 
was a cradle of liberty, and as such giving a bright 
omen for the future. 

In these halls, in 1735, in the trial of John Zenger, 
had been established, for the first time in its history, 
the liberty of the press. Here the New York Assem- 
bly, in 1764, made the protest against the Stamp Act, 
and proposed the General Conference, which was the' 
beginning of the united colonial action. In this old 
State House, in 1765, the Stamp Act Congress — the 
first and the father of American congresses — assembled 
and presented to the English Government that vigor- 
ous protest which caused the repeal of the Act. and 



24 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

checked the first step toward the usurpation which lost 
the American Colonies to the British Empire. Within 
these walls the Congress of the Confederation had com- 
missioned its ambassadors abroad, and in ineffectual 
efforts at government had created the necessity for the 
concentration of federal authority, now to be consum- 
mated. . 

The first Congress of the United States, gathered m 
this ancient temple of liberty, greeted Washington and 
accompanied him to the balcony. The famous men 
visible about him were Chancellor Livingston, Vice- 
President John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, Gover- 
nor Clinton, Roger Sherman, Richard Henry Lee, 
General Knox, and Baron Steuben. But we believe 
that among the invisible host above him at this supreme 
moment of the culmination in permanent triumph of 
the thousands of years of struggle for self-government, 
were the spirits of soldiers of the Revolution who had 
died that their countrymen might enjoy this blessed 
day, and with them were the Barons of Runnymede, 
and' William the Silent, and Sidney, and Russell, and 
Cromwell, and Hampden, and the heroes and martyrs 
of liberty of every race and age. 

As he came forward, the multitude in the streets, in 
the windows, and on the roofs sent up such a rapturous 
shout that Washington sat down overcome with emo- 
• tion As he slowly rose, and his tall and majestic form 
again appeared, the people, deeply affected, in awed 
silence viewed the scene. The Chancellor solemnly 
read to him the oath of of=fice, and Washington, repeat- 
ing said: "I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully 
execute the office of President of the United States, 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. 25 

and will, to the best of my ability, preserve, protect, 
and defend the Constitution of the United States." 
Then he reverently bent low and kissed the Bible, utter- 
ing with profound emotion, "So help me, God." The 
Chancellor waved his robes and shouted : "It is don^. 
Long live George Washington, President of the United 
States!" "Long live George Washington, our first 
President !" was the answering cheer of the people, and 
from the belfries rang the bells, and from forts and 
ships thundered the cannon, echoing and repeating 
the cry with responding acclaim all over the land: 
"Long live George Washington, President of the 
United States!" 

The simple and imposing ceremony over, the inaugu- 
ral read, the blessing of God prayerfully petitioned in 
old St. Paul's, the festivities passed : and Washington 
stood alone. No one else could take the helm of State, 
and enthusiast and doubter alike trusted only him. 
The teachings and habits of the past had educated the 
people to faith in the independence of their States; 
and for the supreme authority of the new Government 
there stood, against the precedent of a century and the 
passions of the hour, little besides the arguments of 
Hamilton, Madison, and Jay in The Federalist, and the 
judgment of Washington. 

With the first attempt to exercise national power be- 
gan the duel to the death between State Sovereignty, 
claiming the right to nullify federal laws or secede from 
the Union, and the power of the Republic to command 
the resources of the country, to enforce its authority, 
and protect its life. It was the beginning of the sixty 
years' war for the Constitution and the nation. It 



26 OKA TIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

seared consciences, degraded politics, destroyed parties, 
ruined statesmen, and retarded the advance and devel- 
opment of the country; it sacrificed hundreds of thou 
aands of precious lives, and squandered thousands of 
Tnillions of money; it desolated the fairest portion o 
the land and carried mourning into every home North 
and South ; but it ended at Appomattox m the abso- 
lute triumph of the Republic. 

Posterity owes to Washington's Admmistration the 
policy and measures, the force and direction which 
made possible this glorious result. In giving the 
organization of the Department of State and Foreign 
Relations to Jefferson, the Treasury to Hamilton and 
the Supreme Court to Jay, he selected for his Cabine 
and called to his assistance the ablest and most eminent 
men of his time. Hamilton's marvelous versatility 
and genius designed the armory and the weapons for 
the promotion of national power and greatness, but 
Washington's steady support carried them through. 
Parties crystallized, and party passions were intense, 
debates were intemperate, and the Union openly 
threatened and secretly plotted against, as the fi m 
pressure of this mighty personality funded the debt and 
established credit; assumed the State debts incurred 
in the War of the Revolution, and superseded the local 
by the national obligation; imposed duties upon im- 
ports and excise upon spirits, and created revenue and 
resources; organized a National banking system for 
public needs and private business, and called out an 
army to put down by force of arms resistance to he 
federal laws imposing unpopular taxes. Upon the plan 
marked out by the Constitution, this great architect, 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. 27 

with unfailing faith and unfaltering courage, builded the 
Republic. He gave to the Government the principles 
of action and sources of power which carried it success- 
fully through the wars with Great Britain in 18 12 and 
Mexico in 1848, which enabled Jackson to defeat nulli- 
fication, and recruited and equipped millions of men 
for Lincoln, and justified and sustained his Proclama- 
tion of Emancipation. 

The French Revolution was the bloody reality of 
France and the nightmare of the civilized world. The 
tyranny of centuries culminated in frightful reprisals 
and reckless revenges. As parties rose to power and 
passed to the guillotine, the frenzy of the revolt against 
all authority reached every country and captured the 
imaginations and enthusiasm of millions in every land, 
who believed they saw that the madness of anarchy, 
the overturning of all institutions, the confiscation and 
distribution of property, would end in a millennium 
for the masses and the universal brotherhood of man. 
Enthusiasm for France, our late ally, and the terrible 
commercial and industrial distress occasioned by the 
failure of the Government under the Articles of Con- 
federation, aroused an almost unanimous cry for the 
young Republic, not yet sure of its existence, to plunge 
into the vortex. The ablest and purest statesmen of 
the time bent to the storm, but Washington was un- 
moved. He stood like the rock-ribbed coast of a con- 
tinent between the surging billows of fanaticism and 
the child of his love. Order is Heaven's first law, 
and the mind of Washington was order. The Revolu- 
tion defied God and derided the law. Washington 
devoutly reverenced the Deity, and believed liberty 



28 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

impossible without law. He spoke to the sober judg- 
ment of the nation and made clear the danger. He 
saved the infant Government from ruin, and expelled 
the French Minister who had appealed from him to 
the people. The whole land, seeing safety only in his 
continuance in of^ce, joined Jefferson in urging him 
to accept a second term. "North and South," pleaded 
the Secretary, "will hang together while they have 
you to hang to." 

No man ever stood for so much to his country and 
to mankind as George Washington. Hamilton, Jeffer- 
son, and Adams, Madison, and Jay, each represented 
some of the elements which formed the Union : Wash- 
ington embodied them all. They fell at times under 
popular disapproval, were burned in effigy, were stoned ; 
but he with unerring judgment was always the leader 
of the people. Milton said of Cromwell, that "war made 
him great, peace greater." The superiority of Washing- 
ton's character and genius was more conspicuous in the 
formation of our Government and in putting it on 
indestructible foundations, than in leading armies to vic- 
tory and conquering the independence of his country. 
"The Union in any event," is the central thought of his 
Farewell Address ; and all the years of his grand life 
were devoted to its formation and preservation. He 
fought as a youth with Braddock and in the capture of 
Fort Du Quesne for the protection of the whole country. 
As Commander-in-chief of the Continental Army, his 
commission was from the Congress of the United Colo- 
nies. He inspired the movement for the Republic, was 
the President and dominant spirit of the Convention 
which framed its Constitution, and its President for 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. 29 

eight years, and guided its course until satisfied that 
moving safely along the broad highway of time, it 
would be surely ascending toward the first place among 
the nations of the world, the asylum of the oppressed, 
the home of the free. 

Do his countrymen exaggerate his virtues? Listen 
to Guizot, the historian of civilization : "Washington 
did the two greatest things which in politics it is per- 
mitted to man to attempt. He maintained by peace 
the independence of his country which he conquered 
by war. He founded a free government in the name 
of the principles of order and by re-establishing their 
sway." Hear Lord Erskine, the most famous of Eng- 
lish advocates : "You are the only being for whom I 
have an awful reverence." Remember the tribute of 
Charles James Fox, the greatest parliamentary orator 
who ever swayed the British House of Commons: 
"Illustrious man, before whom all borrowed greatness 
sinks into insignificance." Contemplate the character 
of Lord Brougham, pre-eminent for two generations ijti 
every department of human activity and thought, and 
then impress upon the memories of your children his 
deliberate judgment: "Until time shall be no more, 
will a test of the progress which our race has made in 
wisdom and virtue be derived from the veneration paid 
to the immortal name of Washington." 

Chatham, who, with Clive, conquered an empire in 
the East, died broken-hearted at the loss of the empire 
in the West, by follies which even his power and elo- 
quence could not prevent. Pitt saw the vast creations 
of his diplomacy shattered at Austerlitz, and fell mur- 
muring: "My country! how I leave my country!" 



30 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

Napoleon caused a noble tribute to Washington to be 
read at the head of his armies ; but, unable to rise to 
Washington's greatness, witnessed the vast structure 
erected by conquest and cemented by blood, to minis- 
ter to his own ambition and pride, crumble into frag- 
ments, and an exile and a prisoner he breathed his last, 
babbling of battle-fields and carnage. Washington, 
with his finger upon his pulse, felt the presence of 
death, and calmly reviewing the past and forecasting the 
future, answered to the summons of the grim messen- 
ger, "It is well"; and as his mighty soul ascended to 
God, the land was deluged with tears and the world 
united in his eulogy. Blot out from the page of his- 
tory the names of all the great actors of his time in the 
drama of nations, and preserve the name of Washing- 
ton, and still the century would be renowned. 

We stand to-day upon the dividing line between the 
first and second century of constitutional government. 
There are no clouds overhead, and no convulsions 
under our feet. We reverently return thanks to Al- 
mighty God for the past, and with confident and hope- 
ful promise march upon sure ground toward the future. 
The simple facts of these hundred years paralyze the 
imagination, and we contemplate the vast accumulations 
of the century with awe and pride. Our population 
has grown from four to sixty-five millions. Its center 
moving westward five hundred miles since 1789, is elo- 
quent with the founding of cities and the birth of States. 
New settlements, clearing the forests and subduing the 
prairies, and adding four millions to the few thousands 
of farms which were the support of Washington's 
Republic, create one of the great granaries of the 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. 31 

world and open exhaustless reservoirs of national 
wealth. 

The infant industries, which the first act of our Ad- 
ministration sought to encourage, now give remunera- 
tive employment to more people than inhabited the 
Republic at the beginning of Washington's Presidency. 
The grand total of their annual output of seven thous- 
and millions of dollars in value places the United States 
first among the manufacturing countries of the earth. 
One-half of all the railroads, and one-quarter of all the 
telegraph lines of the world within our borders, testify 
to the volume, variety, and value of an internal com- 
merce which makes these States, if need be, independent 
and self-supporting. These hundred years of develop- 
ment under favoring political conditions have brought 
the sum of our national wealth to a figure which is past 
the results of a thousand years for the mother-land, 
herself otherwise the richest of modern empires. 

During this generation a civil war of unequaled mag- 
nitude caused the expenditure and loss of eight thous- 
and millions of dollars, and killed six hundred thousand 
and permanently disabled over a million young men ; 
and yet the impetuous progress of the North and the 
marvelous industrial development of the new and free 
South have obliterated the evidences of destruction 
and made the war a memory, and have stimulated pro- 
duction until our annual surplus nearly equals that of 
England, France, and Germany combined. The teem- 
ing millions of Asia till the patient soil and work the 
shuttle and loom as their fathers have done for ages ; 
modern Europe has felt the influence and received the 
benefit of the incalculable multiplication of force by 



32 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

inventive genius since the Napoleonic wars ; and yet, 
only two hundred and sixty-nine years after the little 
band of Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock, our people, 
numbering less than one-fifteenth of the inhabitants of 
the globe, do one-third of its mining, one-fourth of its 
manufacturing, one-fifth of its agriculture, and own 
one-sixth of its wealth. 

This realism of material prosperity, surpassing the 
wildest creation of the romancers who have astonished 
and delighted mankind, would be full of danger for the 
present and menace for the future, if the virtue, intelli- 
gence, and independence of the people were not equal 
to the wise regulation of its uses and the stern preven- 
tion of its abuses. But following the growth and power 
of the great factors, whose aggregation of capital made 
possible the tremendous pace of the settlement of our 
national domain, the building of our great cities and 
the opening of the lines of communication which have 
unified our country and created our resources, have 
come national and state legislation and supervision. 
Twenty millions — a vast majority of our people of 
intelligent age — acknowledging the authority of their 
several churches, twelve millions of children in the com- 
mon schools, three hundred and forty-five universities 
and colleges for the higher education of men and two 
hundred for women, four hundred and fifty institutions 
of learning for science, law, medicine, and theology, 
are the despair of the scofTer and the demagogue, and 
the firm support of civilization and liberty. 

Steam and electricity have not only changed the 
commerce, they have also revolutionized the govern- 
ments of the world. They have given to the press its 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. 33 

powers, and brought all races and nationalities into 
touch and sympathy. They have tested and are trying 
the strength of all systems to stand the strain and con- 
form to the conditions which follow the germinating 
influences of American democracy. At the time of the 
inauguration of Washington, seven royal families ruled 
as many kingdoms in Italy, but six of them have seen 
their thrones overturned and their countries disappear 
from the map of Europe. Most of the kings, princes, 
dukes, and margraves of Germany, who reigned despot- 
ically and sold their soldiers for foreign service, have 
passed into history, and their heirs have neither pre- 
rogatives nor domain. Spain has gone through many 
violent changes, and the permanency of her present 
government seems to depend upon the feeble life of an 
infant prince. France, our ancient friend, with repeated 
and bloody revolutions, has tried the government of 
Bourbon and Convention, of Directory and Consulate, of 
Empire and Citizen King, of hereditary Sovereign and 
Republic, of Empire, and again Republic. The Haps- 
burg and the Hohenzollern, after convulsions which 
have rocked the foundations of their thrones, have been 
compelled to concede constitutions for their people, 
and to divide with them the arbitrary power wielded 
so autocratically and brilliantly by Maria Theresa and 
Frederick the Great. The royal will of George III. 
could crowd the American colonies into rebellion, and 
wage war upon them until they were lost to his king- 
dom ; but the authority of the Crown has devolved 
upon ministers who hold of^ce subject to the approval 
of the representatives of the people, and the equal 
powers of the House of Lords have become vested in 



34 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

the Commons, leaving to the Peers only the shadow of 
their ancient privileges. But to-day the American 
people, after all the dazzling developments of the cen- 
tury, are still happily living under the Government of 
Washington. The Constitution during all that period 
has been amended only upon the lines laid down in the 
original instrument, and in conformity with the recorded 
opinions of the Fathers. The first great addition was 
the incorporation of a Bill of Rights, and the last the 
embedding into the Constitution of the immortal prin- 
ciple of the Declaration of Independence — of the equal- 
ity of all men before the law. No crisis has been too 
perilous for its powers, no evolution too rapid for its 
adaptation, and no expansion beyond its easy grasp and 
administration. It has assimilated diverse nationalities 
with warring traditions, customs, conditions, and lan- 
guages, imbued them with its spirit, and won their pas- 
sionate loyalty and love. 

The flower of the youth of the nations of Conti- 
nental Europe are conscripted from productive indus- 
tries and drilling in camps. Vast armies stand in battle 
array along the frontiers, and a Kaiser's whim or a Min- 
ister's mistake may precipitate the most destructive 
war of modern times. 

Both monarchical and republican governments are 
seeking safety in the repression and suppression of 
opposition and criticism. The volcanic forces of demo- 
cratic aspiration and socialistic revolt are rapidly in- 
creasing and threaten peace and security. We turn 
from these gathering storms to the British Isles and 
find their people in the throes of a political crisis in- 
volving the form and substance of their Government, 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. 35 

and their statesmen far from confident that the enfran- 
chised and unprepared masses Avill wisely use their 
power. 

But for us no army exhausts our resources nor con- 
sumes our youth. Our navy must needs increase in 
order that the protecting flag may follow the expanding 
commerce which is to successfully compete in all the 
markets of the world. The sun of our destiny is still 
rising, and its rays illumine vast territories as yet un- 
occupied and undeveloped, and which are to be the 
happy homes of millions of people. The questions 
which affect the powers of government and the expan- 
sion or limitation of the authority of the Federal Con- 
stitution are so completely settled, and so unanimously 
approved, that our political divisions produce only the 
healthy antagonism of parties which is necessary for 
the preservation of liberty. Our institutions furnish 
the full equipment of shield and spear for the battles 
of freedom ; and absolute protection against every dan- 
ger which threatens the welfare of the people will 
always be found in the intelligence which appreciates 
their value, and the courage and morality with which 
their powers are exercised. The spirit of Washington 
fills the executive office. Presidents may not rise to 
the full measure of his greatness, but they must not 
fall below his standard of public duty and obligation. 
His life and character, conscientiously studied and 
thoroughly understood by coming generations, will be 
for them a liberal education for private life and public 
station, for citizenship and patriotism, for love and de- 
votion to Union and liberty. With their inspiring past 
and splendid present, the people of these United States, 



36 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

heirs of a hundred years marvelously rich in all which 
adds to the glory and greatness of a nation, with an 
abiding trust in the stability and elasticity of their 
Constitution, and an abounding faith in themselveSf 
hail the coming century with hope and joy. 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. 37 



T 



II. 

HE Political Mission of the United States. 
Oration at the Celebration of the 
Birthday of Washington, by the Union 
League Club of Chicago, at Central Music 
Hall, Chicago, February 22, 1888. 



Mr. President and Gentlemen : 

The subject assigned to me falls more naturally into 
the domain of the philosophical theorist, or of the prac- 
tical politician, than of the active man of affairs. We 
are all men of business, and absorbed in its details, and 
neither our time nor our associations admit of prolonged 
speculations upon the possibilities of government. We 
are an industrial people, and the great question with us 
is, How do institutions best serve our needs? We are 
not so wholly materialistic that we cannot deeply feel 
the sentiments of liberty and nationality, and yet both 
form the broad foundation upon which we must build 
for permanence. No intelligent consideration of the 
question affecting our present and future is possible 
without an understanding of the successive stages in 
the development of our system. 

The political mission of the United States has so far 
been wrought out by individuals and territorial condi- 
tions. Four men of unequaled genius have dominated 
our century, and the growth of the West has revolu- 



38 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

tionized the Republic. The principles which have here- 
tofore controlled the policy of the country have mainly 
owed their force and acceptance to Hamilton, Jefferson, 
Webster, and Lincoln. 

The two great creative contests of America were pure- 
ly defensive. They were neither the struggles of dynas- 
tic ambitions nor of democratic revenges. They were 
calm and determined efforts for good government, and 
closed without rancor or the husbanding of resources 
for retaliation. The Revolution was a war for the pres- 
ervation of well-defined constitutional liberties, but 
dependent upon them were the industrial freedom nec- 
essary for the development of the country, the promo- 
tion of manufactures, and independence of foreign pro- 
ducers. 

The first question which met the young confederacy, 
torn by'the jealousies of its stronger and weaker colo- 
nies, was the necessity of a central power strong enough 
to deal with foreign nations and to protect commerce 
between the States. At this period Alexander Hamil- 
ton became the saviour of the Republic. If Shake- 
speare is the commanding originating genius of Eng- 
land, and Goethe of Germany, Hamilton must occupy 
that place among Americans. At seventeen he had 
formulated the principles of government by the people 
so clearly that no succeeding publicist has improved 
them. Before he was twenty-five he had made sugges- 
tions to the hopeless financiers of the Revolution which 
revived credit and carried through the war. With few 
precedents to guide him, he created a fiscal system for 
the United States which was so elastic and comprehen- 
sive that it still controls the vast operations of the treas- 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. 39 

ury and the customs. Though but a few years at the 
bar after his retirement from pubHc life, his briefs are 
embodied in Constitution and statutes, and to his mas- 
terly address the press owes its freedom. This superb 
intelhgence, which was at once philosophic and prac- 
tical, and with unrivaled lucidity could instruct the 
dullest mind on the bearing of the action of the present 
on the destiny of the future, so impressed upon his con- 
temporaries the necessity of a central Government with 
large powers that the Constitution, now one hundred 
and one years old, was adopted, and the United States 
began their life as a nation. 

At this period, in every part of the world, the doc- 
trine that the Government is the source of power, and 
that the people have only such rights as the Govern- 
ment had given, was practically unquestioned, and the 
young Republic began its existence with the new and 
dynamic principle that the people are the sole source of 
authority, and that the Government has such powers 
as they grant to it, and no others. 

Doubt and debate are the safety-valves of freedom, 
and Thomas Jefferson created both. He feared the loss 
of popular rights in centralization, and believed that 
the reserved powers of the States were the only guaran- 
tee of the liberties of the people. He stands supreme 
in our history as a political leader, and left no succes- 
sor. He destroyed the party of Washington, Hamil- 
ton, and Adams, and built up an organization which 
was dominant in the country for half a century. The 
one question thus raised and overshadowing all others 
for a hundred years, half satisfied by compromises, half 
suppressed by threats, at times checking prosperity, at 



40 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

times paralyzing progress, at times producing panics, at 
times preventing the solution of fiscal and industrial 
problems vital to our expansion, was, Are we a Nation? 

For nearly fifty years the prevailing sentiment favored 
the idea that the federal compact was a contract be- 
tween sovereign States. Had the forces of disunion 
been ready for the arbitrament of arms, the results 
would have been fatal to the Union. That ablest ob- 
server of the American experiment, De Tocqueville, 
was so impressed by this that he based upon it an ab- 
solute prediction of the destruction of the Republic. 
But, at the critical period, when the popularity, cour- 
age, and audacity of General Jackson were almost the 
sole hope of nationality, Webster delivered in the 
Senate a speech unequaled in the annals of eloquence 
for its immediate effects and lasting results. The ap- 
peals of Demosthenes to the Athenian democracy, the 
denunciations of Cicero against the conspiracies of 
Catiline, the passionate outcry of Mirabeau pending 
the French Revolution, the warnings of Chatham in the 
British Parliament, the fervor of Patrick Henry for 
independence, were of temporary interest, and yielded 
feeble results, compared with the tremendous conse- 
quences of this mighty utterance. 

It broke the spell of supreme loyalty to the State 
and created an unquenchable and resistless patriotism 
for the United States. It appeared in the school- 
books, and, by declaiming glowing extracts therefrom, 
the juvenile orators of that and succeeding generations 
won prizes at academic exhibitions and in mimic con- 
gresses. Children educated parents, and the pride of 
the fathers and the kindled imaginations of the sons 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. 4 1 

united them in a noble ideal of the great Republic. No 
subsequent patriotic oration met the requirements of 
any public occasion, great or small, which did not breathe 
the sentiment of "Liberty and union, now and forever, 
one and inseparable." As the coldest clod, when first 
inspired by the grand passion of his life, becomes a 
chivalric knight, so, when at last the Union was assailed 
by arms, love of country burst the bonds of materialism 
and sacrificed everything for the preservation of the 
nation's life. From the unassailable conviction of the 
power of the General Government to protect itself, to 
coerce a State, to enforce its laws everywhere, and to 
use all the resources of the people to put down rebel- 
lion, came not only patriotism, but public conscience. 
With conscience was the courage, so rare in commercial 
communities, which will peril business and apparent 
prosperity for an idea. This defeated the slave power, 
and is to-day the most potent factor in every reform. 

The field for the growth and development of this 
sentiment, and for its practical application without fear 
of consequences, was the great West. Virginia's gift 
to the Union of the Northwest Territory, which now 
constitutes five great States, and its prompt dedication 
to freedom, and Jefferson's purchase from the First Na- 
poleon of the vast area now known as Arkansas, Colo- 
rado, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Minnesota, Missouri, 
Mississippi, Nebraska, Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, and 
the Indian Territory, were the two acts of generosity 
and consummate statesmanship which definitely out- 
lined the destiny of the Republic and its political mis- 
sion. 

In the genesis of nations there is no parallel with the 



42 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

growth of the West and its influence upon the world. 
The processes of its settlement reduce to comparative 
insignificance the romances and reaHties of the state- 
builders of the past. Movements of peoples which at 
other periods have been devastating migrations, or due 
to the delirium of speculations, are here the wise found- 
ing and sober development of prosperous communities. 
The fabled Argo, sailing for the Golden Fleece, 
neither bore nor found the wealth carried and discovered 
by the emigrants' wagons on the prairies. The origi- 
nal conditions surrounding our hardy and adventurous 
pioneers ; the riches in poverty, where hope inspired 
the efforts, and the self-denial to clear, or develop, or 
improve, or stock the farm, which was to be at once 
the family home and estate; the church and the school- 
house growing simultaneously with the settlements ; 
citizenship of the great Republic, which could only 
come through the admission of the territory as a State 
into the grand confederacy of commonwealths, and only 
be lost by the dissolution of the Union ; citizenship, 
which meant not only political dignity and indepen- 
dence, but incalculable commercial and business advan- 
tages and opportunities — these were the elements which 
made the West, and these were the educators of the 
dominant power in the nation for the present and the 
future. Thus the West, the child of the Union, met 
the slave power with determined resistance, and its 
threats with a defiant assertion of the inherent powers 
of the Nation, and with the pledge of its young and 
heroic life for their enforcement. This double senti- 
ment found its oracle and representative in Abraham 
Lincoln. He consolidated the Northwest by declaring 



CHAVNCEY i\L DEPEW. 43 

that the Mississippi should flow unvexed to the sea. 
In the great debate with Douglas, his challenge rang 
through the whole land, a summons to battle. "A 
house divided against itself," he said, "cannot stand. 
I believe this Government cannot endure permanently 
half-slave and half-free. I do not expect the Union to 
be dissolved — I do not expect the house to fall — but I 
do expect it will cease to be divided." To enforce that 
expectation he called a million of men to arms, he eman- 
cipated four millions of slaves by Presidential procla- 
mation, and when the victory was won for liberty and 
unity, this most majestic figure of our time, clothed 
with the unlimited powers of a triumphant Govern- 
ment, stood between the passions of the strife, and com- 
manded peace and forgiveness. When he fell by the 
hand of the assassin the hundred years' struggle for 
national existence was ended. He throttled sectional- 
ism and buried it. The Republic for which half a mil- 
lion men had died and a million had been wounded was 
so firmly bedded in the hearts, the minds, and the blood 
of its people, that the question of dissolution will never 
more form part of the schemes of its politicians or re- 
quire the wisdom of its statesmen and the patriotism 
of its people. 

It is impossible to estimate the effect upon our ma- 
terial and moral development of the disappearance of 
the dread and deadly issue of dissolution and civil war 
from our politics. The Nation, emancipated from the 
thraldom of perpetual peril, advanced by leaps and 
bounds in its fiscal policy and industrial progress. Our 
substantial growth in every element of national strength 
since the war, has been greater than in all the years 



44 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

that preceded it. But the very conditions of this 
tremendous development, and the mighty forces con- 
centrated and involved, present grave problems, which 
must be solved if we would be safe. Said De Tocque- 
ville, in 1834: "I cannot believe in the duration of a 
government whose task is to hold together forty differ- 
ent peoples, spread over a surface equal to the half 
of Europe, to avoid rivalries, ambitions, and struggles 
among them, and to unite the action of their indepen- 
dent wills for the accomplishment of the same plans. 
Unless I am greatly mistaken, the Federal Government 
of the United States tends to become daily weaker; it 
draws back from one kind of business after another; it 
more and more restricts the sphere of its action. Natu- 
rally feeble, it abandons even the appearance of force." 

With the admission of the territories already knock- 
ing at the door and fully qualified to become States, we 
will have reached De Tocqueville's fatal forty. But in 
the mean time the pendulum of our politics has swung 
back from the Jeffersonian to the Hamiltonian extreme. 
The Federal Government is everything, the States in a 
national sense nothing. The abolition of slavery, and 
with it sectional lines, and the Civil War, have done 
much to produce this; but commerce has done more. 

The application of steam and electricity to trade has 
made forty commonwealths one. It is not distance 
alone which creates the dangers of the disintegration of 
a government, but difficulty of intercommunication. 
Sixty millions of people covering a continent are in 
much closer communion to-day than were the four mil- 
lions along the Atlantic coast at the adoption of the Con- 
stitution. The President, whose authority De Tocque- 



CHAUNCEV M. DEPEW. 45 

ville thought weak and gradually being reduced to a 
shadow, has acquired power beyond the dreams and 
fears of the fathers. The arbitrary arrests, the procla- 
mations of far-reaching import at which Mr. Lincoln did 
not hesitate, indicate what a President may do in time 
of war. A civil service four times as large as our stand- 
ing army, and subject to executive appointment and 
removal, and the frequent exercise of the veto power 
by President Cleveland, exhibit the extent of his pow- 
ers, even in peace. 

The United States has been fortunate in its Presi- 
dents. The poorest and weakest of them had patriot- 
ism and a sense of public duty which prevented the re- 
sort to desperate expedients for the retention of power. 
But as the country increases in population and in new- 
communities, the functions of the Executive become 
more potent. The legislative and judicial branches re- 
main the same, but the President grows as a potential 
factor of Government. We are always at the mercy of 
the majority, but its intelligence has heretofore pro- 
tected us from its easily stated and possible peril. But 
with a hundred millions of people and a commensurate 
civil service; with the blind fury of intense political 
passions; with an able, audacious, and unscrupulous 
President, anxious for re-election, and sustained by his 
party in anything which secures it, the situation will 
be full of danger. 

The best of Presidents have lowered the standard of 
administration when seeking a second term. The pres- 
ent Executive is an officer highly esteemed for singular 
honesty and directness of purpose, and remarkable for 
inexperience in the duties of government and for ignor- 



46 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

ance of the great issues before the country. With per- 
fect frankness and honest intention to carry out his 
pledges he defied the traditions of his party in his bold 
utterances for Civil Service Reform. He both under- 
stood what he was promising, and believed he had the 
courage and the power to make good his word. The 
best sentiment of the country is overwhelmingly be- 
hind him on this question. And yet, as the canvass of 
1888 opens, the tremendous advantages of an auxiliary 
force of one hundred thousand faithful workers has 
relegated Roman virtue to the rear and brought the 
spoils system to the front. Methods have changed, 
and the borrowed nomenclature of Reform means the 
old practices, with the familiar result of the constant 
substitution of the partisan recruit for the veteran of- 
ficial. 

With the growth of the Republic, the known and 
implied powers of the President become of increasing 
value. As, with larger and more populous districts, 
Congress becomes more distant and vague, the people 
will need and demand an executive to whom appeal can 
be immediate, and whose responsibility is direct. He 
should, however, by constitutional prohibition, be made 
ineligible for a second term. As the peculiarities of his 
position on retirement from office prevent his partici- 
pation in the ordinary business avocations of the citi- 
/.en, he should receive an adequate pension for life, and 
on the retired list, though still in the service, be subject 
to call for any public duty where his experience, char- 
acter, and ability would be of value. Thus his adminis- 
tration, free from temptation and the baser ambitions, 
would be impelled with resolute and unflinching en- 



CtiAUMCEY M. DEPEW. 47 

deavor to win the plaudits of the present and the admi- 
ration and gratitude of posterity. 

While no act or thought should tend to resurrect 
the baleful doctrine of State Sovereignty, we need to be 
educated in the direction of State Rights. The immen- 
sity of our nationality and its centralizing tendencies 
create a feeling of dependence upon Government which 
enfeebles the American character and is hostile to Ameri- 
can liberty. Home rule is the school and inspiration 
of m.anliness and independence. The town meeting 
brings power directly to the people, where it belongs, 
and clearly and sharply draws the line between public 
business and private business. The American travel- 
ing in Europe chafes under the restraints of administra- 
tion. The bayonet or the baton is always by his side. 
The Government carries his person and goods, trans- 
mits his message, appears as a proprietor in the mine 
and factory, and suffocates enterprise, development, and 
ambition. The demagogue and the agitator are already 
appealing to the sentiment for a strong government ; 
to make it so strong that it will both impoverish and 
enrich with its burdens and its bounties, and the citizen 
surendering his individuality will go for everything to 
the Government. This is the underlying principle of 
despotism, under whose operation there would have 
been no great Republic, and the West would have re- 
mained a wilderness. 

We are too great and too generous, and have too 
many and vast opportunities, to adopt the selfish motto 
of "America for Americans," — meaning to include only 
those who are now citizens and their descendants. But 
the needs of the present and the preparation for the 



48 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OE 

future require that all citizens shall be Americans 
Healthy patriotism can be sentimental, but it must be 
intelligent. Said the philosopher: "Let me write the 
songs of a people, and I care not who make their laws." 
That day has passed, never to return. Steam and elec- 
tricity have broken the spell. Revolutions can no 
longer be conjured, nor ancient rights defended, by mel- 
ody. The marching music of the columns of liberty 
must be, not the Marseillaise or the national anthem, 
but the high and harmonious teachings of the common 
school. 

There is an intellectual awakening in this land, and its 
stimulants affect the well-being and the safety of life, 
and property, and law. The trades-union is a debat- 
ing club; a session of the knights, a congress of labor; 
the Sabbath picnic is a school, not of divinity, but 
of theology. The questions discussed are vital in 
their proper solution to the State, Society, and the 
Church. The churches of all creeds, and men of every 
faith, are doing magnificent work in the conservation of 
the virtues and habits of liberty, but the Preacher has 
lost his political influence and the Priest much of the 
power he possessed in the more primitive period. 

The teachers of disintegration, destruction, and in- 
fidelity possess the activity of propagandists and the 
self-sacrificing spirit of martyrs. Their field is ignor- 
ance, their recruiting sergeant is distress. Only faith 
grounded in knowledge can meet these dangerous, 
ceaseless, and corrupting influences. In the midst of 
the perils, the sheet-anchor of the Ship of State is the 
common school. Before the era of great cities and 
crowded populations, when it was easy both to earn a 



CHAUMCBY M. DEPEtV. 49 

living and to gain a competence, when the best in- 
fluences of every settlement reached every part of it, 
the State met every requirement in furnishing, free, a 
fair business education. But now by far the larger 
part of our people have no common ancestry in the 
Revolutionary war, and a generation has come to its 
majority which knows little of the Rebellion and its 
results. Colonists from Europe form communities, both 
in city and country, where they retain the language, 
customs, and traditions of the Fatherland, and live 
and die in the belief that the Government is their 
enemy. To meet there conditions, the State provides 
an education which does not educate, and the prison, 
and the poorhouse. 

Ignorance judges the invisible by the visible. Turn 
on the lights. Teach, first and last, Americanism. Let 
no youth leave the school without being thoroughly 
grounded in the history, the principles, and the incal- 
culable blessings of American liberty. Let the boys 
be the trained soldiers of constitutional freedom, the 
girls the intelligent mothers of freemen, and the sons 
of the anarchists will become the bulwarks of the law. 
American liberty must be protected against hostile 
invasion. 

We welcome the fugitives from oppression, civil or 
religious, who seek our asylum with the honest purpose 
of making it their homes. We have room and hospi- 
tality for emigrants who come to our shores to better 
their condition by the adoption of our citizenship, with 
all its duties and responsibilities. But we have no place 
for imported criminals, paupers, and pests. The revo- 
lutionist who wants to destroy the power of the ma- 



50 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

jority with the same dynamite with which he failed to 
assassinate the Emperor or the Czar is a pubhc enemy, 
and must be so treated. We are no longer in need of 
the surplus population of the Old World, and must 
carefully examine our guests. The priceless gift of 
citizenship should never be conferred until by years of 
probation the applicant has proved himself worthy, and 
then a rigid examination in open court should test his 
knowledge of its limitations as well as its privileges, 
and his cordial acceptance of both. It is monstrous 
that the time of our courts and the patience of our 
juries should be occupied and tried in the repeated 
prosecution of persistent disturbers of the peace who 
refuse to become citizens. On the first conviction by 
a jury they should be expelled from the country. 

This youngest of cities, destined to be one of the 
greatest on the earth, in deadly peril of fire and sack, 
with indomitable spirit and lofty courage saved civiliza- 
tion in American municipalities, and the nation by wise 
laws should prevent any possible recurrence of the 
danger. In government by majorities, the existence of 
the system depends- upon the purity of the ballot. 
The minority must know that it is fairly beaten, to 
peacefully accept its defeat. A crisis more critical than 
the Civil War has twice threatened us, because there 
was doubt as to the honesty of the vote. In the first 
instance, it was averted by wise compromise; and in 
the second, the fears proved fallacious. But it is the 
highest duty to provide every safeguard against repeti- 
tions of such dangers. The whole power and machinery 
of the State must be used for the unbought and unin- 
timidated vote and the fair count. Submission to the 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. 51 

will of the majority has become universally the accep- 
ted faith of the people; and, while that faith is un- 
shaken, no party will ever appeal to the only other 
alternative, arms. 

It is the duty of the General Government in all elec- 
tions for Congress or President to protect, at every cost, 
the voter and the ballot-box. It is the duty of every 
State to reduce to a minimum the opportunities for 
fraud upon the citizen or the improper influencing 
of his choice. It is a general and local scandal that 
the expenses of the candidate have grown beyond the 
means of the poor and honest man. No system can be 
right or safe under which the treasuries of the oppos- 
ing parties must be filled with sums so vast that they 
equal the great accumulations of prosperous corpora- 
tions. The ballot should be printed by the State and 
distributed at the public cost, under conditions which 
would enable the most ignorant voter to select his ticket 
without help, and deposit it with no one knowing its 
contents but himself. Then as the Republic grows in 
power and population, its safety and perpetuity will be 
assured by keeping pure the channels through which 
the ever-increasing millions of freemen with more ma- 
jestic and impressive force express their will. 

The political mission of the United States is purely 
internal. The wise policy and traditions of Washing- 
ton against entangling alliances with foreign nations 
have been happily strengthened by our geographical 
position. The moral effect of our experiment upon the 
destinies of peoples and governments has been greater 
than that of all other causes combined. In preserving 
in letter and spirit our liberties, in developing our re- 



52 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

sources and adding to the wealth, prosperity, and power 
of the Republic, in the adoption of those measures which 
favor happiness and contentment within our borders, 
we are indirectly aiding the struggling masses, and fur- 
nishing the arguments for, and inspiring the hopes of, 
the patriots of every country of the world. 

It is vital to the success of our mission that all ques- 
tions be boldly met, fearlessly discussed, and promptly 
acted upon. The area of arable acres in the United 
States is 20 per cent, larger than that of China, which 
supports a population of nearly four hundred millions. 
As time is reckoned in the history of nations, in the 
near future there will be two hundred millions of people 
in this country. All of them will be dependent upon 
industrial conditions, and the larger part of them will 
be wage-earners. Our problem is not. How can they 
be controlled? For they are the majority, and the 
majority is the Government ; but, How are they to be 
satisfied? Macaulay's prediction has been supported 
by the ablest political economists of the Old World. 
They claim that with the conditions of crowded popu- 
lations always on the brink of starvation, with hopeless 
poverty and chronic distress such as prevail under Euro 
pean governments, the Republic will end in anarch} 
and anarchy in despotism. 

Whether there be much or little in these gloomy fore 
bodings, the least of them sternly impresses the lesson 
of maintaining and promoting, by every measure which 
experience has tested and wisdom can suggest, that 
policy which will keep wages above the line of mere 
subsistence, and in the general prosperity of diversified 
industries hold open the opportunities for every man 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. 53 

to rise. This issue is broadly national, and is of equal 
interest to the North and South, the East and West. 
Cheap transportation has obliterated the lines which 
formerly divided the planters and the manufacturers, 
and engendered and embittered the sectional controver- 
sies. The New South thrills with the movement of 
mighty industries which are developing her mines, util- 
izing her great forces and resources, and founding her 
cities; the flames of busy furnaces illumine her wasted 
fields, and near and quick markets awaken to hitherto 
unknown activities her dormant agriculture. The hum 
of the spindles and the inspiring music of machinery 
sound over the prairies and along the lakes as well as 
among New England hills and Pennsylvania mines. 

The theory of the wealth of nations has been dis- 
cussed by the ablest and most competent of philoso- 
phers and statesmen, from the time of Adam Smith, 
with the demonstrated result that principles of political 
economy are not of universal application, but must be 
modified by the conditions and necessities of different 
nations. At the zenith of prosperity, when confidence 
and credit were projecting enterprises which covered 
the continent, and were fraught with untold wealth and 
healthy expansion, or disaster and collapse upon a 
scale of equal magnitude and commensurate distress, 
President Cleveland has boldly and happily challenged 
the policy upon which all these investments were 
based. 

The President says to the combined forces of Capital 
and Labor, flushed with past successes and eager for the 
conquest of the world: "Halt! you are on the wrong 
road." Business is built upon stability of statutes. 



54 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

Fluctations in the law must not be a factor in the cal- 
culations of commerce. It is fortunate for the future 
of the country that the President has taken a position 
so radical and defiant that discussion and decision are 
imperative. If the result is as I think it will and ought 
to be — the defeat of the President and of his party — he 
will take his place among the few eminent specialists 
and experimentalists who have died in demonstrating 
that the gun was not loaded. 

During a quarter of a century of passionate nation- 
ality, of free labor, of protected industries, the growth 
of the Republic has been without precedent or parallel 
in ancient or modern times. Its population has in- 
creased at the rate of a million a year, and a thousand 
millions per annum have been added to its accumulated 
wealth. It has paid five-sixths of the enormous losses 
of the Civil War; it has borne the burden of a gigantic 
debt ; it has spent with lavish hand, and yet has saved 
half as much as all the rest of the world. With sixty 
thousand millions of capital, and a developed capacity 
for creating a product worth over ten billions a year, its 
political mission is, as far as possible, to monopolize its 
home market in the materials it possesses or can manu- 
facture, to cross the seas, to enter all ports and explore 
new countries, and to compete with the most advanced 
nations in all the markets of the earth. 

Ninety-nine years ago, on the fourth day of July, 
1789, George Washington signed the first tariff act 
passed by the young Republic. Political independence 
had been proclaimed by the immortal Declaration of 
1776, but the country was still dependent upon Great 
Britain for every article of manufacture in metals or 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. 55 

fabrics. With more gloomy forebodings than those 
caused by the separation of the Empire was this news 
received in England. It was the emancipation of raw 
materials and the birth of manufactures in the United 
States, and without them the Republic had no "mani- 
fest destiny." At the close of an exhausting war, with 
an unpaid, half-clothed, and riotous army, a worthless 
currency, shattered credit, and an empty treasury, Alex- 
ander Hamilton, great in every department of mental 
activity, but the greatest of finance ministers, was 
called upon to provide the moneys for carrying on 
the Government, meeting its obligations, and restoring 
its credit. In a report whose arguments have never 
been answered or equaled, he gave, as a solution of the 
present problem and a future prosperity, protection to 
home industries as a continuous policy, and when neces- 
sary, bounties and premiums besides. The closing year 
of the century of Hamilton's idea finds thirteen States 
grown to thirty-eight, four millions of people increased 
to sixty, and nominal national wealth to sixty billions. 
A manufacturing plant not worth half a million of 
dollars has expanded until its annual product is six 
thousand millions, and the consumption per year by 
our own people of the output of our farms and our 
factories is not less than five times the consolidated 
capital of 1789. From an increasing indebtedness to 
foreign nations, which drained all our resources, the re- 
turning tide of the balance of trade is flowing in enrich- 
ing currents through every artery of our industrial life. 
Upon this golden monument, with a hundred millions 
of surplus in the national treasury, and proud and pros- 
perous populations all round, the culminating century 



56 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

finds President Cleveland proclaiming with equal bold- 
ness, if less originality, the new departure. 

The celebration of the birthday of the Father of his 
Country recalls at this juncture the peculiar signifi- 
cance of the language of the law which received his first 
signature as President, and which had his heartiest ap- 
proval : "Whereas it is necessary for the support of the 
Government, for the discharge of the debts of the 
United States, and the encouragement and protection 
of manufactures, that duties be levied on goods, wares, 
and merchandise imported." Since that most fruitful 
legislation, whenever theory has overcome the plain 
teachings of practice, the penalty has been panics and 
distress. "The friend of the many against the profits 
of the few," is the seductive role which captivates the 
free trader, and its glittering allurements on a subject 
new to his thought and studies have led out to sea the 
strong common-sense of Mr. Cleveland. It is the basis 
of the policy upon which he has staked his own for- 
tunes and those of his party. "The tariff raises the 
price to consumers," he says, "of all articles imported 
and subject to duty by precisely the sum paid for such 
duties" ; and, as the consumers are enormously in ex- 
cess of the laborers upon purely protected articles, he 
rushes naturally and triumphantly to the conclusion 
that tariff laws are "the vicious, inequitable, and illogi- 
cal source of unnecessary taxation." 

In i8i6, 1832, 1846, the weapons which the President 
found in 1888 won great victories, but like Samson's 
arms about the pillars of the Temple, the result in- 
volved all in common ruin. The mill closed, the fur- 
nace fires out, the farmer bankrupt, and the laborer a 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. 57 

tramp, are the lurid lessons of these well-meant experi- 
ments upon a delusive theory of the relations of the 
factory to the farm. 

The genius of our scheme of general government and 
the spirit of our people are hostile to direct taxation for 
national affairs. The federal tax-gatherer has always 
provoked friction and lawlessness, even under the neces- 
sities of war, and his presence at every door to levy and 
take three times the amount required by the state for 
home and local wants would peril both prosperity and 
loyalty. Two hundred and fifty millions of dollars flow 
into the national treasury annually, and under the cus- 
toms system of collection we are unconscious of our bur- 
dens. It is only the necessities of war which justify in- 
ternal revenue taxes, and only a concession to the moral 
sentiment of the country which permits the continu- 
ance of any part of them. No revenue laws are perfect 
or permanent, but in modifying them to meet the 
changing conditions of the country the principle of 
ample protection for everything which can be success- 
fully produced or manufactured on American soil must 
be maintained. 

The factory doubles the value of the adjoining farms 
for the farmers, whose tariff exactions are too small to 
be calculated. Beside the mill grows the village, and 
the resistless energies of American development burst 
the village bounds and build the Western city. To this 
new mart the railroad is constructed almost with the 
speed of its moving trains, and the quick and cheap 
communication between country and city furnishes new 
solvents for the safety in the prosperity of the country. 
Protected opportunity has developed our incalculable 



55 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

natural resources and enabled us to manufacture in 
iron, glass, cotton, and wool as well as any nation in the 
world, and more cheaply, save only in wages. If the 
duty on importations is the bounty to labor which 
lifts it above the degrading and dangerous conditions 
of Europe, and enables our artisans to retain their self- 
respect and independence, it is the Republic's best 
investment. 

Celebrating here to-day the one hundred and fifty- 
sixth anniversary of Washington's birth, and recalling 
the influence of his victories in war, his counsels in con- 
vention, his acts as President of the Republic, and his 
matchless character, the visible results of the policy in- 
augurated by the first exercise of his executive approval 
are the most marvelous. The purely agricultural states 
which formed his confederacy have become the fore- 
most region of the world in the variety, the usefulness, 
and the volume of its manufactures, and the fertility of 
its inventive genius. Paying its labor fifty per cent, 
more than the rest of the world, it produces the food, 
the clothing, and the household effects which the laborer 
uses, cheaper than the older nations; and the surplus of 
wages flowing into the savings-banks are finally invested 
in homes, and in the multitude of homesteads is the 
greatest safety of Society and the State. 

The United States is the granary, the workshop, the 
political hope of the world. It can largely feed, and in 
the interchanges of trade supply many other material 
wants of the peoples who are inspired by its successful 
liberty to strive for better government and nobler lives. 
Its vast network of railways, its lakes, rivers, and canals, 
carry a commerce of incalculable value, and its surplus 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. 59 

above our home consumption is to be the growing ele- 
ment of our national wealth. This grand product is 
freighted in foreign ships, and its carriers depend for 
their profit upon the enemies of the expansion of our 
commerce. I said to a representative of the new steam- 
ship line which is to make the link across the Pacific 
of the route from the East over the American Conti- 
nent and to Europe— a route whose possibilities tax 
the imagination— "Why, instead of connecting with the 
Canadian Pacific and running through Canada, do you 
not meet our transcontinental system, making Chicago 
your entrepot and distributing point for the West and 
New York for the East?" He answered : "Because we 
would lose our subsidy of three hundred thousand dol- 
lars a year from the British Government." 

In that answer lay the secret of the disappearance of 
the American flag from the ocean. In the recognition 
of the necessity for a commercial nation meeting for its 
citizens the aid given by foreign government^, which 
IS beyond the power of private enterprise, is the potency 
and promise of American trade with the world and of 
the old-time supremacy of America on the .seas. The 
new conquest will give to us the commerce of South 
America, and wealth beyond the dreams of Pizarro and 
the Spanish victors. It will follow the opening of the 
African continent ; it will share in the riches of India 
and the i.slands of the East; our shipyards will be the 
centers of fruitful industries along our coasts, and our 
navy once more our boa.st, our protection, and our 
pride. 

Last summer Victoria, Queen of England and Em- 
press of India, celebrated with imposing ceremonial the 



6o ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

fiftieth anniversary of her reign. The world never wit- 
nessed a, more gHttering pageant, and no people in her- 
alding and accompanying the procession with loyal en- 
thusiasm and ringing acclaim ever viewed a half-century 
of retrospect with loftier pride. The Queen, as sove- 
reign and woman, commanded their devotion, respect, 
and love, but nowhere in that splendid procession ap- 
peared the witness for the triumphs of the people which 
will be remembered as the chief glory of her reign. 
Subject princes from India, whose ancestors had faced 
Alexander of Macedon, and tributary sovereigns from 
Asia and Africa and the Islands of the Sea exhibited 
the conquests of English arms and the world-circling 
supremacy of the British flag. Representatives of the 
reigning houses of the monarchies of Europe testified 
to her royal lineage and inherited rights, and the me- 
dieval pomp and chivalry brought the spirit of feudal- 
ism into vivid contrast with the glorious sunlight of the 
nineteenth century. 

At the same time, in Philadelphia, the United States 
was celebrating the hundredth anniversary of the life 
of its Constitution. The most ancient and venerable 
relic of the past in its procession was the Declaration 
of Independence, emblazoning every banner with the 
motto : "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that 
all men are created equal ; that they are endowed by 
their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among 
these arc life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness"; 
and next in order of age and sanctity was the Consti- 
tution, the charter of our Government, commencing with 
the immortal axiom of representative liberty : "We, the 
people of the United States." In our ceremonial were 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. 6l 

the mammoth printing-presses, the locomotive, the 
steamship, the steam-engine, the telegraph, trained light- 
ning in its manifold forms of usefulness; the inventions 
and their marvelous and beneficent powers, the arts in 
their development and perfection ; the schoolhouse and 
the university ; the hardy pioneer, the retreating savage, 
the wilderness, the settlement, the farms and rich har- 
vests, the village, the city with its magic growth and 
wondrous industries; and, pervading the pageant, the 
political ideal of man, panoplied with American liberty, 
and responsible and obedient only to God and the law. 

Westward the course of empire takes its way ; 

The first four acts already past,, 
A fifth shall close the drama with the day ; 

Time's noblest offspring is the last. 

As the human race have moved along down the 
centuries, the vigorous and ambitious, the dissenters 
from blind obedience and the original thinkers, the 
colonists and state-builders, have broken camp with the 
morning, and followed the sun until the close of day. 
They have tarried for ages in fertile valleys and beside 
great streams ; they have been retarded by barriers of 
mountains and seas beyond their present resources to 
overcome ; but as the family grew into the tribe, the 
tribe into the nation, and equal authority into the des- 
potism of courts and creeds, those who possessed the 
indomitable and unconquerable spirit of freedom have 
seen the promise flashed from the clouds in the glorious 
rays of the sinking orb of day, and first with despair 
and courage, and then with courage and hope, and lastly 
with faith and prayer, they have marched Westward. 
In the purification and trials of wandering and settlement 



62 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

they have left behind narrow and degrading laws, tradi- 
tions, customs, and castes, until now, as the Occident 
faces the Orient across the Pacific, and the globe is 
circled, at the last stop and in their permanent home 
the individual is the basis of government, and all men 
are equal before the law. The glorious example of the 
triumphant success of the people governing themselves 
fans the feeble spirit of the effete and exhausted Asiatic 
with the possibilities of the replanting of the Garden of 
Eden and of the restoration of the historic grandeur of 
the birthplace of mankind. It is putting behind every 
bayonet which is carried at the order of Bismarck or the 
Czar men who, in doing their own thinking, will one 
day decide for themselves the problems of peace and 
war. It will penetrate the breeding-places of Anarchy 
and Socialism, and cleanse and purify them. 

The scenes of the fifth act of the grand drama are 
changing, with the world as its stage, and all races and 
tongues the audience. And yet, as it culminates in 
power, and grandeur, and absorbing interest, the atten- 
tion remains riveted upon one majestic character. He 
stands the noblest leader who was ever intrusted with 
his country's life. His patience under provocation, his 
calmness in danger, and lofty courage when all others 
despaired, his prudent delays when the Continental 
Congress was imperative and the Staff almost insubordi- 
nate, and his quick and resistless blows when action was 
possible, his magnanimity to his defamers and generosity 
to his foes, his ambition for his country and unselfish- 
ness for himself, his sole desire the freedom and inde- 
pendence of America, and his only wish to return after 
victory to private life and the peaceful pursuits and 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. 63 

pleasures of home, have all combined to make him, by 
the unanimous judgment of the world, the foremost 
figure in history. Not so abnormally developed in any 
direction as to be called a genius, yet he was the strong- 
est because the best balanced, the fullest rounded, the 
most even and most self-masterful of men — the incar- 
nation of common sense and moral purity, of action and 
repose. 

The Republic will live so long as it reveres the 
memory and emulates the virtues of George Washing- 
ton. 



64 OJiA TIONS AND SPEECHES OF 



o 



III. 

RATION AT THE UNVEILING OF THE BAR- 

THOLDi Statue of Liberty Enlightening 
THE World New York Harbor, October 
28, 1886. 



We dedicate this statue to the friendship of nations 
and the peace of the world. 

The spirit of Hberty embraces all races in common 
brotherhood; it voices in all languages the same needs 
and aspirations. The full power of its expansive and 
progressive influence cannot be reached until wars 
cease, armies are disbanded, and international disputes 
are settled by lawful tribunals and the principles of jus- 
tice. Then the people of every nation, secure from in- 
vasion and free from the burden and menace of great 
armaments, can calmly and dispassionately promote 
their own happiness and prosperity. The marvelous 
development and progress of this Republic is due to 
the fact that in rigidly adhering to the advice of 
Washington for absolute neutrality and non-interference 
in the politics and policies of other governments, we 
have avoided the necessity of depleting our industries 
to feed our armies, of taxing and impoverishing our re- 
sources to carry on war, and of limiting our liberties to 
concentrate power in our Government. Our great civil 
strife, with all its expenditure of blood and treasure, 
was a terrible sacrifice for freedom. The results are so 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. 65 

immeasurably great that by comparison the cost is 
insignificant. The development of liberty was impossi- 
ble while she was shackled to the slave. The divine 
thought which intrusted to the conquered the full 
measure of home rule, and accorded to them an equal 
share of imperial power, was the inspiration of God. 
With sublime trust it left to liberty the elevation of 
the freedman to political rights and the conversion of 
the rebel to patriotic citizenship. 

The rays from this torch illuminate a century of 
unbroken friendship between France and the United 
States. Peace and its opportunities for material prog- 
ress and the expansion of popular liberties send from 
here a fruitful and noble lesson to all the world. It will 
teach the people of all countries that in curbing the 
ambitions and dynastic purposes of princes and privi- 
leged classes, and in cultivating the brotherhood of 
man, lies the true road to their enfranchisement. The 
friendship of individuals, their unselfish devotion to 
each other, their willingness to die in each other's stead, 
are the most tender and touching of human records; 
they are the inspiration of youth and the solace of age; 
but nothing human is so beautiful and sublime as two 
great peoples of alien race and language transmit- 
ting down the ages a love begotten in gratitude, and 
strengthening as they increase in power and assimilate 
in their institutions and liberties. 

The French alliance which enabled us to win our 
independence is the romance of history. It overcame 
improbabilities impossible in fiction, and its results sur- 
pass the dreams of imagination. The most despotic of 
kings, surrounded by the most exclusive of feudal aris- 



66 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OE 

tocracies, sending fleets and armies officered by the 
scions of the proudest of nobihties to fight for subjects 
in revolt and the liberties of the common people, is a 
paradox beyond the power of mere human energy to 
have wrought or solved. The march of this medieval 
chivalry across our States — respecting persons and 
property as soldiers never had before ; never taking an 
apple or touching a fence rail without permission and 
payment ; treating the ragged Continentals as if they 
were knights in armor and of noble ancestry ; captivat- 
ing our grandmothers by their courtesy and our grand- 
fathers by their courage — remains unequaled in the 
poetry of war. It is the most magnificent tribute in 
history to the volcanic force of ideas and the dynamitic 
power of truth, though the crust of the globe imprison 
them. In the same ignorance and fearlessness with 
which a savage plays about a powder magazine with a 
torch, the Bourbon King and his Court, buttressed by 
the consent of centuries and the unquestioned posses- 
sion of every power of the State, sought relief from 
cloying pleasures, and vigor for enervated minds, in per- 
mitting and encouraging the loftiest genius and the most 
impassioned eloquence of the time to discuss the rights 
and liberties of man. With the orator the themes were 
theories which fired only his imagination, and with a 
courtier they were pastimes or jests. Neither speakers 
nor listeners saw any application of these ennobling 
sentiments to the common mass and groveling herd, 
whose industries they squandered in riot and debauch, 
and whose bodies they hurled against battlement and 
battery to gratify ambition or caprice. But these reve- 
lations illuminated many an ingenious soul among the 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. 67 

young aristocracy, and with distorted rays penetrated 
the Cimmerian darkness which enveloped the people. 
They bore fruit in the heart and mind of one youth to 
whom America owes much and France everything— 
the Marquis de Lafayette. 

As the centuries roll by, and in the fullness of time 
the rays of Liberty's torch are the beacon lights of the 
world, the central niches in the earth's Pantheon of 
Freedom will be filled by the figures of Washington and 
Lafayette. The story of this young French noble's 
life is the history of the time which made possible this 
statue, and his spirit is the very soul of this celebration. 
He was the heir of one of the most ancient and noble 
families of France ; he had inherited a fortune which 
made him one of the richest men in his country; and 
he had enlarged and strengthened his aristocratic posi- 
tion by marriage, at the early age of sixteen, with a 
daughter of the ducal house of Noailles. Before him 
were pleasure and promotion at court, and the most 
brilliant opportunities in the army, the state, and the 
diplomatic service. He was a young officer of nine- 
teen, stationed at Metz, when he met, at the table of 
his commander, the Duke of Gloucester, the brother of 
George the Third. The Duke brought news of an in- 
surrection which had broken out in the American colo- 
nies, and read, to the amazement of his hearers, the 
strange dogmas and fantastic theories which these "in- 
surgents," as he called them, had put forth in what they 
styled their Declaration of Independence. That docu- 
ment put in practice the theories which Jefferson had 
studied with the French philosophers. It fired at once 
the train which they had laid, in the mind of this young 



68 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

nobleman of France. Henceforth his Hfe was dedicated 
to "Liberty Enhghtening the World." The American 
Commissioners at Paris tried to dissuade this volunteer 
by telling him that their credit was gone, that they 
could not furnish him transportation, and by handing 
him the dispatches announcing the reverses which had 
befallen Washington, the retreat of his disheartened 
and broken army across New Jersey, the almost hope- 
less condition of their cause. But he replied in these 
memorable words : "Thus far you have seen my zeal 
only ; now it shall be something more. I will purchase 
and equip a vessel myself. It is while danger presses 
that I wish to join your fortunes." The King prohibits 
his sailing — he eludes the guards sent for his arrest ; his 
family interpose every obstacle, and only his heroic 
young wife shares his enthusiasm and seconds his reso- 
lution to give his life and fortune to liberty. When on 
the ocean battling with the captain who fears to take 
him to America, and pursued by British cruisers special- 
ly instructed for his capture, he writes to her this lov- 
ing and pathetic letter: "I hope for my sake you will 
become a good American. This is a sentiment proper 
for virtuous hearts. Intimately allied to the happiness 
of the whole human family is that of America, destined 
to become the respectable and sure asylum of virtue, 
honesty, toleration, equality, and of tranquil liberty." 
Except the Mayflower, no ship ever sailed across the 
ocean from the Old World to the New carrying passen- 
gers of such moment to the future of mankind. 

It is idle now to speculate whether our fathers could 
have succeeded without the French alliance. The strug- 
gle would undoubtedly have been infinitely prolonged 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. 69 

and probably compromised. But the alliance assured 
our triumph, and Lafayette secured the alliance. The 
fabled argosies of ancient and the armadas and fleets of 
modern times were commonplace voyages compared 
with the mission enshrined in this inspired boy. He 
stood before the Continental Congress and said : "I wish 
to serve you as a volunteer and without pay," and at 
twenty took his place with Gates and Green and Lin- 
coln as a Major-General in the Continental Army. As 
a member of Washington's military family, sharing with 
that incomparable man his board and bed and blanket, 
Lafayette won his first and greatest distinction in re- 
ceiving from the American chief a friendship which 
was closer than that bestowed upon any other of his 
compatriots, and which ended only in death. The great 
commander saw in the reckless daring with which he 
carried his wound to rally the flying troops at Brandy- 
wine, the steady nerve with which he held the column 
wavering uncjer a faithless general at Monmouth, the 
wisdom and caution with which he maneuvered inferior 
forces in the face of the enemy, his willingness to share 
every privation of the ill-clad and starving soldiery, 
and to pledge his fortune and credit to relieve their pri- 
vations, a commander upon whom he could rely, a pa- 
triot whom he could trust, a man whom he could love. 
The surrender of Burgoyne at Saratoga was the first 
decisive event of the war. It defeated the British plan 
to divide the country by a chain of forts up the Hud- 
son and conquer it in detail ; it inspired hope at home 
and confidence abroad ; it seconded the passionate 
appeals of Lafayette and the marvelous diplomacy of 
Benjamin Franklin ; it overcame the prudent counsels 



70 OKATWNS AND SPEECHES OF 

of Necker, warning the King against this experiment, 
and won the treaty of alliance between the old Monar- 
chy and the young Republic. Lafayette now saw that 
his mission was in France. He said, "I can help the 
cause more at home than here," and asked for leave of 
absence. Congress voted him a sword, and presented 
it with a resolution of gratitude, and he returned bear- 
ing this letter from that convention of patriots to his 
King: "We recommend this young nobleman to your 
Majesty's notice as one whom we know to be wise in 
council, gallant in the field, and patient under the hard- 
ships of war." It was a certificate which Marlborough 
might have coveted, and Gustavus might have worn as 
the proudest of his decorations. But though King and 
Court vied with each other in doing him honor; though 
he was welcomed as no Frenchman had ever been by 
triumphal processions in cities and fetes in villages, by 
addresses and popular applause, he reckoned them of 
value only in the power they gave him to procure aid 
for Liberty's fight in America. "France is now com- 
mitted to war," he argued, "and her enemy's weak 
point for attack is in America. Send there your money 
and men." And he returned with the army of Rocham- 
beau and the fleet of De Grasse. 

"It is fortunate," said De Maurepas, the Prime Min- 
ister, "that Lafayette did not want to strip Versailles 
of its furniture for his dear Americans, for nobody 
could withstand his ardor." None too soon did this 
assistance arrive, for Washington's letter to the Ameri- 
can Commissioners in Paris passed it on the way, in 
which he made this urgent appeal: "If France delays 
a timely and powerful aid in the critical posture of our 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. 71 

affairs, it will avail us nothing should she attempt it 
hereafter. We are at this hour suspended in the bal- 
ance. In a word, we are at the end of our tether, and 
now or never deliverance must come." General Wash- 
ington saw in the allied forces now at his disposal that 
the triumph of independence was assured. The long 
dark night of doubt and despair was illuminated by the 
dawn of hope. The material was at hand to carry out 
the comprehensive plans so long matured, so long de- 
ferred, so patiently kept. The majestic dignity which 
had never bent to adversity, that lofty and awe-inspir- 
ing reserve which presented an impenetrable barrier to 
familiarity, either in council or at the festive board, so 
dissolved in the welcome of these decisive visitors that 
the delighted French and the astounded American 
soldiers saw Washington for the first and only time in 
his life express his happiness with all the joyous effer- 
vescence of hilarious youth. 

The flower of the young aristocracy of France, in 
their brilliant uniforms, and the farmers and frontiers- 
men of America, in their faded continentals, bound by 
a common baptism of blood, became brothers in the 
knighthood of Liberty. With emulous eagerness to be 
first in at the death, while they shared the glory, they 
stormed the redoubts at Yorktown, and compelled the 
surrender of Cornwallis and his army. While this prac- 
tically ended the war, it strengthened the alliance and 
cemented the friendship between the two great peoples. 
The mutual confidence and chivalric courtesy which 
characterized their relations has no like example in 
international comity. When an officer from General 
Carleton, the British Commander-in-Chief, came to head- 



72 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

quarters with an offer of peace and independence, if 
the Americans would renounce the French alHance, 
Washington refused to receive him ; Congress spurned 
Carleton's Secretary bearing a like message ; and the 
states, led by Maryland, denounced all who entertained 
propositions of peace which were not approved by 
France, as public enemies. And peace with indepen- 
dence meant prosperity and happiness to a people in 
the very depths of poverty and despair. France, on the 
other hand, though sorely pressed for money, said in 
the romantic spirit which permeated this wonderful 
union : "Of the twenty-seven millions of livres we have 
loaned you, we forgive you nine millions as a gift of 
friendship, and when with years there comes prosperity 
you can pay the balance without interest." 

With the fall of Yorktown Lafayette felt that he 
could do more for peace and independence in the diplo- 
macy of Europe than in the war in America. His ar- 
rival in France shook the Continent. Though one of 
the most practical and self-poised of men, his romantic 
career in the New World had captivated courts and 
peoples. In the formidable league which he had quick- 
ly formed with Spain and France, England saw humili- 
ation and defeat, and made a treaty of peace by which 
she recognized the independence of the Republic of 
the United States. 

In this treaty were laid the deep, broad, and inde- 
structible foundations for the great statue we this day 
dedicate. It left to the American people the working 
out of a problem of self-government. Without king 
to rule, or class to follow, they were to try the experi- 
ment of building a nation upon the sovereignty of the 



CHAUNCEY M, DEPEW. 73 

individual and the equality of all men before the law. 
Their only guide, and trust, and hope were God and 
Liberty. In the fraternal greetings of this hour sixty 
millions of witnesses bear testimony to their wisdom, 
and the foremost and freest Government in the world 
is their monument. 

The fight for liberty in America was won. Its fu- 
ture here was threatened with but one danger — the 
slavery of the negro. The soul of Lafayette, purified 
by battle and suffering, saw the inconsistency and the 
peril, and he returned to this country to plead with 
State legislatures and with Congress for the liberation 
of what he termed "my brethren, the blacks." But now 
the hundred years' war for liberty in France was to 
begin. 

America was its inspiration, Lafayette its apostle, and 
the returning French army its emissaries. Beneath the 
trees by day, and in the halls at night, at Mt. Vernon, 
Lafayette gathered from Washington the Gospel of 
Freedom. It was to sustain and guide him in after- 
years against the temptations of power and the despair 
of the dungeon. He carried the lessons and the grand 
example through all the trials and tribulations of his 
desperate struggle and partial victory for the enfran- 
chisement of his country. From the ship, on depart- 
ing, he wrote to his great chief, whom he was never to 
see again, this touching good-by : "You are the most 
beloved of all the friends I ever had or shall have any- 
where. I regret that I cannot have the inexpressible 
pleasure of embracing you in my own house and wel- 
coming you in a family where your name is adored. 
Everything that admiration, respect, gratitude, friend 



74 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

ship, and filial love can inspire is combined in my 
affectionate heart to devote me most tenderly to you. 
In your friendship I find a delight which no words can 
express." His farewell to Congress was a trumpet-blast 
which resounded round a world then bound in the chains 
of despotism and caste. Every government on the 
Continent was an absolute monarchy, and no language 
can describe the poverty and wretchedness of the people. 
Taxes levied without law exhausted their property; 
they were arrested without warrant and rotted in the 
Bastile without trial, and they were shot at as game, 
and tortured without redress, at the caprice or pleasure 
of their feudal lords. Into court and camp this mes- 
sage came like the handwriting on the wall at Belshaz- 
zar's feast. Hear his words: "May this immense tem- 
ple of freedom ever stand a lesson to oppressors, an 
example to the oppressed, a sanctuary for the rights of 
mankind; and may these happy United States attain 
that complete splendor and prosperity which will illus- 
trate the blessings of their government, and for ages to 
come rejoice the departed souls of its founders." Well 
might Louis the Sixteenth, more far-sighted than his 
ministers, exclaim : "After fourteen hundred years of 
power the old Monarchy is doomed." 

While the principles of the American Revolution 
were fermenting in France, Lafayette, the hero and 
favorite of the hour, was an honored guest at royal tables 
and royal camps. The proud Spaniard and the Great 
Frederic of Germany alike welcomed him, and every- 
where he announced his faith in government founded on 
the American idea. The financial crisis in the affairs of 
King Louis on the one hand, and the rising tide of popu- 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. 75 

lar passion on the other, compelled the summons of the 
Assembly of Notables at Versailles. All the great offi- 
cers of state, the aristocracy, the titled clergy, the royal 
princes were there, but no representative of the people. 
Lafayette spoke for them, and, fearless of the effort of 
the brother of the King to put him down, he demanded 
religious toleration, equal taxes, just and equal adminis- 
tration of the laws, and the reduction of royal expendi- 
tures to fixed and reasonable limits. This overturned 
the whole feudal fabric which had been in course of con, 
struction for a thousand years. To make effectual and 
permanent this tremendous stride toward the American 
experiment, he paralyzed the Court and Cabinet by the 
call for a National Assembly of the people. Through 
that Assembly he carried a Declaration of Rights, 
founded upon the natural liberties of man— a concession 
of popular privilege never before secured in the modern 
history of Europe; and going as far as he believed the 
times would admit toward his idea of an American Re- 
public, he builded upon the ruins of absolutism a con- 
stitutional monarchy. 

But French democracy had not been trained and 
educated in the schools of the Puritan or the Colonist. 
Ages of tyranny, of suppression, repression, and tor- 
ture had developed the tiger and dwarfed the man. 
Democracy had not learned the first rudiments of lib- 
erty—self-restraint, and self-government. It beheaded 
King and Queen, it drenched the land with the blood of 
the noblest and best ; in its indiscriminate frenzy and 
madness it spared neither age nor sex, virtue nor merit, 
and drove its benefactor, because he denounced its ex- 
cesses and tried to stem them, into exile and the dun- 



7^ dRA TIONS AND SPEECHES dP 

geon of Olmutz. Thus ended in the horrors of French 
Revolution Lafayette's first fight for hberty at home. 

After five years of untold sufferings, spurning release 
at the price of his allegiance to monarchy, holding with 
sublime faith, amidst the most disheartening and dis- 
couraging surroundings, to the principles of freedom 
for all, he was released by the sword of Napoleon Bona- 
parte, to find that the untamed ferocity of the Revo- 
lution had been trained to the service of the most bril- 
liant, captivating, and resistless of military despotisms 
by the mighty genius of the great Dictator. He only 
was neither dazzled nor dismayed, and when he had re- 
jected every offer of recognition and honor. Napoleon 
said : "Lafayette alone in France holds fast to his origi- 
nal ideas of liberty. Though tranquil now, he will 
reappear if occasion offers." Against the First Consul- 
ate of Bonaparte he voted, "No, unless with guarantees 
of freedom." When Europe lay helpless at the feet of 
the conqueror, and in the frenzy of military glory France 
neither saw nor felt the chains he was forging upon her, 
Lafayette from his retirement of Lagrange pleaded 
with the Emperor for republican principles, holding 
up to him the retributions always meted out to tyrants, 
and the pure undying fame of the immortal few who 
patriotically decide, when upon them alone rests the 
awful verdict whether they shall be the enslavers or the 
saviors of their country. 

The sun of Austerlitz set in blood at Waterloo; the 
swords of the allied Kings placed the Bourbon once 
more on the throne of France. In the popular tempest 
of July, the nation rose against the intolerable tyranny 
of the King, and, calling upon this unfaltering friend of 



CHAVNC^y M. DEPEW. 77 

liberty, said with one voice : "You alone can save France 
from despotism, on the one hand, and the orgies of the 
Jacobin mob, on the other; take absolute power; be 
marshal, general, dictator, if you will." But, in assum- 
ing command of the National Guard, the old soldier 
and patriot answered, amidst the hail of shot and shell : 
"Liberty shall triumph, or we all perish together." 
He dethroned and drove out Charles the Tenth, and 
France, contented with any destiny he might accord 
to her, with unquestioning faith left her future in his 
hands. He knew that the French people were not yet 
ready to take and faithfully keep American liberty. 
He believed that in the school of constitutional govern- 
ment they would rapidly learn, and in the fullness of 
time adopt, its principles; and he gave them a king 
who was the popular choice, and surrounded him with 
the restraints of charter and an Assembly of the people. 
And now this friend of mankind, expressing with his 
last breath a fervent prayer that his beloved France 
might speedily enjoy the liberty and equality and the 
republican institutions of his adored America, entered 
peacefully into rest. United in a common sorrow and 
a common sentiment, the people of France and the peo- 
ple of the United States watered his grave with their 
tears and wafted his soul to God with their gratitude. 
To-day, in the gift by the one, and the acceptance by 
the other, of this colossal statue, the people of the two 
countries celebrate their unity in republican institutions, 
in governments founded upon the American idea, and 
in their devotion to liberty. Together they rejoice that 
its spirit has penetrated all lands and is the hopeful 
future of all peoples. American liberty has been for 



7§ ORATIONS AMD SPEECHES OE 

a century a beacon light for the nations. Under its 
teachings, and by the force of its example, the Italians 
have expelled their petty and arbitrary princelings and 
united under a parliamentary government ; the gloomy 
despotism of Spain has been dispelled by the repre- 
sentatives of the people and a free press ; the great 
German race have demonstrated their power for empire 
and their ability to govern themselves. The Austrian 
monarch, who, when a hundred years ago Washington 
pleaded with him across the seas for the release of La- 
fayette from the dungeon of Olmutz, replied that "he 
had not the power," because the safety of his throne 
and his pledges to his royal brethren of Europe com- 
pelled him to keep confined the one man who repre- 
sented the enfranchisement of the people of every race 
and country, is to-day, in the person of his successor, 
rejoicing with his subjects in the limitations of a Con- 
stitution which guarantees liberties, and a Congress 
which protects and enlarges them. Magna Charta, won 
at Runnymede for Englishmen, and developing into 
the principles of the Declaration of Independence with 
their descendants, has returned to the mother country 
to bear fruit in an open Parliament, a free press, the 
loss of royal prerogative, and the passage of power from 
the classes to the masses. 

The sentiment is sublime which moves the people of 
France and America, the blood of whose fathers, com- 
mingling upon the battle-fields of the Revolution, made 
possible this magnificent march of liberty and their own 
republics, to commemorate the results of the past and 
typify the hopes of the future in this noble work of 
art. The descendants of Lafayette, Rochambeau, and 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. 79 

De Grasse, who fought for us in our first struggle, and 
Laboulaye, Henri Martin, De Lesseps, and other grand 
and brilHant men, whose eloquent voices and powerful 
sympathies were with us in our last, conceived the idea, 
and it has received majestic form and expression through 
the genius of Bartholdi. 

In all ages the achievements of man and his aspira- 
tions have been represented in symbols. Races have 
disappeared and no record remains of their rise or fall, 
but by their monuments we know their history. The 
huge monoliths of the Assyrians and the obelisks of 
the Egyptians tell their stories of forgotten civiliza- 
tions, but the sole purpose of their erection was to 
glorify rulers and preserve the boasts of conquerors. 
They teach sad lessons of the vanity of ambition, the 
cruelty of arbitrary power, and the miseries of mankind. 
The Olympian Jupiter enthroned in the Parthenon ex- 
pressed in ivory and gold the awful majesty of the 
Greek idea of the King of the Gods; the bronze statue 
of Minerva on the Acropolis offered the protection of 
the patron Goddess of Athens to the mariners who 
steered their ships by her helmet and spear; and in 
the Colossus of Rhodes, famed as one of the Wonders 
of the World, the Lord of the Sun welcomed the 
commerce of the East to the city of his worship. But 
they were all dwarfs in size and pigmies in spirit beside 
this mighty structure and its inspiring thought. Higher 
than the monument in Trafalgar Square, which com- 
memorates the victories of Nelson on the sea; higher 
than the Column Vendome, which perpetuates the 
triumphs of Napoleon on the land ; higher than the 
towers of the Brooklyn Bridge, which exhibit the latest 



So ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

and grandest results of science, invention, and indus- 
trial progress, this Statue of Liberty rises toward the 
heavens to illustrate an idea which nerved the three 
hundred at ThermopyL-E and armed the ten thousand 
at Marathon ; which drove Tarquin from Rome, and 
aimed the arrow of Tell; which charged with Crom- 
well and his Ironsides, and accompanied Sidney to the 
block ; which fired the farmer's gun at Lexington, and 
razed the Bastile in Paris ; which inspired the charter 
in the cabin of the Mayfloiver, and the Declaration of 
Independence from the Continental Congress. 

It means that with the abolition of privileges to the 
few, and the enfranchisement of the individual; the 
equality of all men before the law, and universal suf- 
frage; the ballot secure from fraud, and the voter from 
intimidation; the press free, and education furnished 
by the State for all ; liberty of worship, and free speech ; 
the right to rise, and equal opportunity for honor and 
fortune; the problems of labor and capital, of social re- 
generation and moral growth, of property and poverty, 
will work themselves out under the benign influences 
of enlightened law-making and law-abiding liberty, with- 
out the aid of kings and armies, or of anarchists and 
bombs. 

Through the Obelisk, so strangely recalling to us 
of yesterday the past of twenty centuries, a forgotten 
monarch says: "lam the great King, the Conqueror, 
the Chastiser of Nations," and except as a monument 
of antiquity it conveys no meaning and touches no 
chord of human sympathy. But, for unnumbered centu- 
ries to come, as Liberty levels up the people to higher 
standards and a broader life, this statue will grow 



CHAUMCEY M. DEPEW. 8l 

in the admiration and affections of mankind. When 
Frankhn drew the Hghtning from the clouds, he httle 
dreamed that in the evolution of science his discovery 
would illuminate the torch of Liberty for France and 
America. The rays from this beacon, lighting this 
gateway to the continent, will welcome the poor and 
the persecuted with the hope and promise of homes 
and citizenship. It will teach them that there is room 
and brotherhood for all who will support our institu- 
tions and aid in our development ; but that those who 
come to disturb our peace and dethrone, our laws are 
aliens and enemies forever. I devoutly believe that 
from the Unseen and the Unknown, two great souls 
have come to participate in this celebration. The 
faith in which they died fulfilled, the cause for which 
they battled triumphant, the people they loved in the 
full enjoyment of the rights for which they labored 
and fought and suffered, the spirit voices of Washing- 
ton and Lafayette join in the glad acclaim of France 
and the United States to Liberty Enlightening the 
World, 



§2 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES 6P 



IV. 

SPEECH AT THE OnE HUNDRED AND NINETEENTH 
Annual Banquet of the Chamber of Com- 
merce OF the State of New York, November 
15, 1887. 



Mr. President and Gentlemen : 

Your Chairman has illustrated the truthful character 
of Trade by the statement which he has made in regard 
to me. He stated, in his opening address, that there 
were represented in the Chamber all the factors of our 
political body politic — the Republican, at his best ; the 
Democrat, as he could ; and the Mugwump, by the 
cream ; but he forgot that neither on the dais nor the 
floor we find a Prohibitionist. 

I feel the embarrassment of standing here, represent- 
ing the United States, ^n the presence of these Mem- 
bers of Parliament from Great Britain, who quarrel on 
the other side to a point which requires the military, 
almost, to keep them apart, and masquerade here as 
the Evangels of Peace ; and yet I have been told that 
between the wily Englishman and the canny Scot there 
has been a conspiracy concocted which is to settle, in 
spite of us, the great Fishery Question — that this peace 
delegation, marching under the banner of Home Rule, 
in which most of us agree with them, is to commit us 
absolutely and beyond recall, to "peace at any price" ; 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEIV. 83 

and then the Fisheries Commissioner, our distinguished 
guest, Mr. Chamberlain, is to fix the price. I am only 
afraid that he, with these Scotch members, may get the 
best of us in this controversy, because it is the pecul- 
iarity of the Scotchman that he keeps the Sabbath day 
and everything else that he can lay his hands on. 

The question given me is rather large for an evenino- 
crowded with many themes and great orators. It re- 
calls an incident of college days when the sententious 
Professor of Rhetoric said to me : "Sir, your time is 
three minutes; your subject, 'The Immortality of the 
Soul'!" But it has always been the habit of the 
Chamber of Commerce to deal broadly and familiarly 
with important matters. It has never been local or 
sectional in its interests or opinions. It has expressed 
itself with power and vigor upon every question which, 
during the one hundred and twenty years of its exist- 
ence, has influenced the integrity, the credit, or the 
prosperity of the country. It has always appreciated 
the grand fact that all roads run to New York, and the 
real destination of every vessel, no matter at what port 
of our seacoast or our lakes she may land, is this 
harbor. 

We have had our annual lessons in the election, the 
clamor of which is still ringing in our ears, and the 
results are suggestive. They leave the political prophet 
doubtful of his predictions, and increase the problem 
for the probable candidates. The members of Parlia- 
ment who are visiting us, on reading our papers in the 
heat of the controversy, thought our campaign litera- 
ture was compiled from the Scriptures and our partisan 
vocabulary furnished by the Testament, while they had 



84 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

additional proof of the slander of the assertions of our 
rival that this is the most godless city on the continent 
when they found that the issue fought and won was 
the virtue of a "simple Christian life." In the larger 
conflict which covered the State, all parties may im- 
prove an invaluable axiom, that it is the highest polit- 
ical wisdom not to fool with dangerous heresies which 
affect the stability of property and business, but to 
expose their fallacies and denounce their results. 

We meet not only amidst the echoes of a recent elec- 
tion, but just at the close of the most solemn tragedy 
of the year, and one of the most eventful in our his- 
tory. Chicago, one of the youngest of our great cities, 
was solving a problem of vaster moment to the future 
of government by the people and for the people than 
has fallen to the lot of any municipality in a century. 
The principles involved became of national and inter- 
national importance. The fate of anarchy in America 
interested princes and peasants, statesmen and publi- 
cists of the Old World, and the fate of the anarchists 
adjudged guilty of murder aroused the sympathy of 
sentimentalists, the terrors of the timid, and the em- 
phatic voice of public opinion in the New. Repugnant 
to our feelings and our humanity as was the execution, 
it demonstrated that the velvet glove of Liberty in- 
cased the iron hand of the Law. Under European 
governments the enemy of society feels the grip of the 
secret police ever on his shoulder, and behind the ranks 
of the constabulary are the bayonets of the soldiers. 
The resistless forces of the standing armies garrison 
every town and arc bivouacked in every center of 
population. Such remedies and safeguards are against 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. 85 

the spirit of our institutions, and our only reliance for 
order, property, and life is upon the vigilant enforce- 
ment of the principle that there is no liberty without 
law. If an uncontrollable propensity for riot, rapine, 
and murder, fearing the consequences of its acts under 
despotic or monarchical governments, hopes here for 
toleration of its teachings, immunity for its acts, and 
the ultimate triumph of its efforts, the time has come 
for the lesson to be sternly taught, that the guardians 
of the law the world over are not so dangerous as a 
free people when aroused to a full sense of public and 
private danger. The uprising which followed the guns 
of Sumter, and the graves of the five hundred thous- 
and heroes who fell fighting for the flag, expressed 
the value placed by Americans upon their institutions, 
their Constitution, and their liberty. 

There have arrived upon our shores in the last ten 
years a million more people than inhabited the country 
at the time of the formation of the Government. While 
we can still welcome those who will add to our strength 
and assist in the development of our resources, we should 
most rigidly inquire who these emigrants are and for 
what purpose they come. We quarantine cholera, yel- 
low fever, and small-pox, and we ought to have a national 
department of political health, empowered to search 
for paupers, lepers, and criminals, and by summary 
procedure, to seize the open and blatant enemies. of our 
Government who are not citizens, and send them home. 
As things are now, if a cause for quarrel should arise 
with Russia or Austria or any other power, they need 
not declare war, but by flooding our cities with the 
propaganda of treason and revolution, they can paral- 



86 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

yze our business and destroy our peace, without trouble 
or expense to themselves. 

Happily we can turn easily from these gloomy fore- 
bodings to a splendid present and brilliant future. All 
our ills are only the spots upon the sun, which neither 
obscure nor impair the glorious light of the orb of day. 
Never in our history were we in such prosperous con- 
dition, and our credit on so stable a basis. A sound 
currency is the first necessity of a commercial people, 
and ours is beyond question or dispute. The panic of 
1873 was one of the most disastrous in the series of 
such calamities, and its depression continued for years ; 
but it was the culmination of the losses of the Civil 
War, of wild speculation, of false finance, and inflation. 
With seven hundred and forty millions of paper money, 
we held for its redemption only one hundred and thirty- 
five millions of coin. Bankruptcy and ruin were the 
inevitable results. But to-day against eight hundred 
and twenty-five millions of paper, we have nine hundred 
millions of silver and gold. The promise is wedded to 
the pledge, and general prosperity is the product. For 
nine years past the balance of trade in favor of the 
United States has mounted up to the magnificent fig- 
ure of thirteen hundred millions. This golden current, 
of an average of one hundred and thirty millions a year, 
draining Europe and pouring into America, has not 
flown into the treasuries of corporations, or capitalists, 
or monopolies. It has reached every farmer, helped 
every manufactory, mill, and furnace, given employ- 
ment and wages to artisans and laborers, and been of 
incalculable service to our merchants. This magnificent 
profit, sufficient almost to pay our national debt, is al- 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. 87 

ready producing unparalleled industrial results by its 
active employment and reinvestment. Never before 
in the history of the world has the average of wages 
been so high, and the purchasing power of money so 
great, as in the United States to-day. These are the 
two conditions which make a free country the paradise 
of honest labor. There Js no civilized country where 
so many workingmen own their homes. The solvent 
of national prosperity and happiness is not the confis- 
cation of land upon crazy theories of its common use, 
but the widest distribution of its ownership. The man 
who holds in fee his house and lot, and within the walls 
of his cottage, however humble it may be, gathers his 
family, forms the tender fireside associations, and be- 
gins to feel the independence of his position — becomes 
at once a defender of the law and a determined foe of 
anarchy. The broadest philanthropy, the most benefi- 
cent and best-paying selfishness in the use of capital, is 
to make cheap and easy the purchase of homesteads. 

Providence has given to us the raw material for limit- 
less manufactures, and fertile fields from which to draw 
sustenance for untold millions of people. While I 
have fixed views as to the policy which will continue 
the harmonious development of agriculture and fac- 
tories, and solve labor problems by general prosperity, 
I will not disturb the peace of this meeting, of diverse 
opinions, by their discussion. I was glad that the Sec- 
retary of the Interior threw down the challenge to- 
night, in that vague, but perfectly understood, senti- 
ment of his, for free trade. I sincerely hope that he 
will persuade the great party, of which he is an orna- 
ment and a leader, to make it the front plank in its 



88 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

platform in the coming presidential election. I promise 
him, that the party to which I belong will state the 
opposite in equally emphatic terms. And then I hope, 
and have no doubt that he hopes, that we shall have 
one Presidential contest fought out in this country, 
where mud and dirt and slander and personal detrac- 
tion and the personality of the candidate shall disap- 
pear, and what principle is to govern the prosperity 
of the American people shall be decided directly by 
the American people themselves. But there are some 
matters of the first importance upon which, among 
merchants and business men, there can be no dispute. 
England belts the world with her flag; the adventures 
of her explorers are the knight-errantry of this century, 
and her navies patrol the seas, her armies brave deadly 
climates, and her agents visit savage tribes to find new 
markets for her manufactures. Bismarck has built a 
wall of protection about Germany mountains high to 
improve prices for the German farmers and wages for 
German workmen, while all the resources of the Empire 
are bent upon extending the area of territory in every 
quarter of the earth which can absorb the German 
product. We Americans, with the results demonstrat- 
ing unequaled genius for internal development, seem 
to have lost our faculty for the sea. A chance in the 
markets of the world for our increasing surplus of pro- 
duction is one of the safety valves for the energies and 
the needs of a growing population. We build one 
hundred and forty thousand miles of railroad at a capi- 
talization of eight billions of dollars to bring the output 
of our farms, our mills, and our mines to the seacoast, 
and then sit on our treasures and gaze upon the ocean 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. ■ 89 

with something of the helpless wonder of the simple 
aborigines who first roamed these States. The political 
sagacity of the hour finds no means for preventing a 
surplus in the Treasury, which threatens the credit and 
stability of business and the demoralization of the Gov- 
ernment, and seeks to diminish it by appropriating 
millions for dredging creeks which can be only utilized 
for eel-pots and terrapin-farms, when proper mail sub- 
sidies might build a merchant marine which would carry 
our flag once more over all the waters of the world, 
furnish a ready-made navy in time of war, and start 
vast shipyards upon the Delaware and arms of the 
sea, north and south. One thousand and five hundred 
millions of dollars is the value of the commerce of the 
United States, and all of it is carried under alien flags. 
The English, the German, and the French kindly carry 
our persons and our freight and skim the cream of our 
trade. 

One year ago a distinguished governor of an interior 
State, standing in this hall, said to us: "You merchants 
along the coast scare too easy. This country wants no 
navy. If a hostile fleet of ironclads should anchor in 
your harbor and bombard your city, three millions of 
men would march from the Lakes to your rescue." My 
dear Governor, we are all members of one body. The 
failure of the West would destroy the East, the de- 
struction of the cities and credits of the East would 
ruin the West. The United States is a great Repub- 
lic; its diverse climatic conditions, industrial develop- 
ment, and needs, blend harmoniously to form a mighty 
nation, which must be able to protect itself in every 
part, and trade in every quarter of the world. We 



90 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

have no time to listen to the pessimist or the croaker. 
The vital problems of Capital and Labor are solving 
themselves in the full and remunerative employment 
of the one and opportunity and good wages for the 
other. The genius of our liberty is an equal chance for 
every man to rise and enrich himself, and in the pro- 
tection of the individual in his struggle to earn, and in 
the possession of what he accumulates. 



CHAUNC^Y M. DEPEW, 91 



s 



'V. 

PEECH AT A Dinner Given to the Hon. Justin 
McCarthy, M.P., at the Hoffman House, New 
York, October 2, 1886, by the Irish Parlia- 
mentary Fund Association. 



Mr. Chairman and Gentlemen: 

The first of my ancestors reached this country about 
two hundred and fifty years ago; many of them came 
afterwards; and the result is that I am able successful, 
ly to stand in the presence of every nationality as one 
of kindred blood. But none of the national organiza- 
tions to which I am related, so far as I know, have 
spent the day in creating a resolution and alleging that 
it passed four years ago, relating to Home Rule in Ire- 
land. It was only a Welshman who was equal to such 
a stretch of the imagination. One of my ancestors left 
Ireland a hundred and twenty-five years ago— and I left 
It three weeks ago. He never returned; but I expect 
to take my seat in the stranger's gallery of the Irish 
Parliament, unless I should be elected as a member from 
County Cork. 

It affords me an unusual pleasure to begin the festive 
exercises of the winter by joining in a welcome to our 
distinguished guest of to-night. With his versatility, 
his marvelous capacity to move in many ways— and all 



92 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

acceptable to his friends and to himself — he seems to 
me to be, more than any other man on the other side, * 
peculiarly an American. He has impressed himself 
upon the American people as a literary man, by pos- 
sessing that facility which secures from them a read- 
ing. In his romances he seems to be reciting history, 
and his histories are romances. But we welcome him 
here to-night, not because he has touched that chord 
which is responded to by every cultivated American — 
and every American is cultivated — but because he 
represents a principle in which every American agrees 
with him. In England, during the recent canvass 
and election, a Tory Member of Parliament said 
to me: "Does anybody in America take any inter- 
est in the question which Mr. Gladstone has precipi- 
tated upon us, except the Irish?" I said to him: 
"There are no cross-roads in the United States where 
the question is not watched with the same eagerness 
with which in a Presidential canvass candidates and 
questions are talked about. There are no cross-roads 
in America where the Irish question is not to-night. 
There are no cross-roads, hamlets, villages, or cities in 
this country where a silent vote is not being cast day 
by day ; and the only difference between an ordinary 
Presidential election with us and this election is that 
our voices and our votes are unanimously on one 
side." "Well," he said, "that is because you are not 
informed." I said to him: "It is because we are edu- 
cated on that question, and England proper is not." 
The principle of Home Rule starts from the town meet- 
ing, starts from the village caucus, starts from the ward 
gathering, reaches the county board of supervisors, 



Chauncey m. depew. 93 

stops at the State legislature, and delegates imperial 
power only to Congress. The whole genius and spirit 
of American liberty is Home Rule in the locality where 
it best understands what it needs, and that only in gener- 
al matters shall the central Government control. With 
all our English-speaking race, whatever may be its ori- 
gin or its commingling with other races, there is at bot- 
tom a savage spirit — a brutal spirit — by which we seek 
to gain w^iat is necessary to our power or to our in- 
terests by might, and to hold it no matter what may 
be the right. Under the impetus of that spirit, the 
English-speaking race have trod upon rights and sacred 
privileges until they virtually circle and control the 
globe. We ourselves in our own country are no stran- 
gers to the spirit, in the manner in which for a century we 
trampled upon the rights of the slave, in the manner in 
which we to-day trample upon the rights of the Indians. 
But, thank God, in the evolution of the moral principle 
of human nature, in the enlightenment which belongs 
to the race of which we are so proud, in the exercise 
and the power of the Church within and without, there 
has grown up within our race a conscience to which an 
appeal can be successfully made. It is the appeal to 
that conscience which came within seventy-five thous- 
and votes of carrying the election for Home Rule for 
Ireland during the last campaign. Except for faith in 
one man, that election would not have shown many 
votes for Home Rule in England, for the English peo- 
ple — and I met them everywhere — are not enlightened, 
not yet educated. I know the common, middle-class 
Englishman. Whatever may be the prejudice aroused 
against him in Ireland, or in this country, he is a hard- 



94 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

headed, a conscientious, a moral, and family-loving 
man. All he needs is to be enlightened as to what is 
right and what is wrong, and he rises to the emergency. 
He had followed Gladstone for a quarter of a century, 
and when Gladstone said : "This is the right," believ- 
ing it not to be the right, he still followed Gladstone. 
When Gladstone and those who are behind him have 
educated him, within two years from to-night he will 
turn around and say to the Tory Government, to Union- 
Liberal Government, to Liberal Government, to Radi- 
cal Government: "Justice to Ireland, or you cannot 
stay in power." 

Now I thought I would talk with these people. A 
Yankee does not amount to much if he does not ask 
questions. And I am a Yankee— that is, an Irish Yan- 
kee. I said to a Tory of some note: "Why do you 
oppose Mr. Gladstone's bill?" "Why," said he, "be- 
cause it would confiscate, through an Irish Parliament, 
all the land there is in Ireland, and the Protestant 
minority would be crushed out and driven from the 
Island," I said to a Union-Liberal : "Why do you 
oppose Home Rule in Ireland?" "Why," said he, "be- 
cause it would lead to the disruption of the British Em- 
pire; and that is precisely the question presented in 
your Rebellion and Civil War." I said to the English 
manufacturer : "Why don't you help Ireland by taking 
over your capital and developing her industries and 
great national capacities?" He said: "Because the 
beggars wont work." I said to an English squire, who 
is alive to-day, but who is simply the mummied repre- 
sentative of his ancestors of the fourteenth century: 
"Why are you opposed to Gladstone and Home Rule?" 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEIV. 95 

"Why," said he, "because the Irish are children, and 
must have a strong- hand to govern them." Well, 
gentlemen, all those questions are answered success- 
fully either in America or Ireland to-day. The fact 
that among the noblest, the most brilliant, the most 
magnificent contributions to the forces of human liber- 
ty, not only in Ireland but in the world, which have 
been given in the last century, have come from the 
Protestant minority in Ireland, answers the question of 
Irish bigotry. Through that ancestor who left Ireland 
a hundred and twenty-five years ago, I come from that 
same Presbyterian stock which is represented to-day 
by Parnell, and which dared to take its chances w^ith 
Home Rule among its fellow-citizens. What have the 
Irishmen in this country done? Whenever they are 
freed from the distressing and oppressing influences 
which have borne them down for centuries in their coun- 
try, they do work. They have built our great public 
works ; they have constructed our vast system of rail- 
ways ; they have done more than that : they have risen 
to places of power and eminence in every walk of indus- 
try and in every avenue which is open to brains and to 
pluck. The only complaint we have against them is, 
that they show too much genius for government and 
get all the offices. I have some ambitions myself, and 
I am for Home Rule in Ireland, because I want these 
fellows to go back to give me a chance. 

I read in one of the leading papers this morning — I 
shall not state which for fear of exciting an irruption 
here on this platform, but it was the leading paper — 
that the Prime Minister of Austria, who was a member 
of the Irish Peerage, under some name which I now 



96 Orations and speeches of 

forget, had been engaged through his agent in evicting 
some hundreds of his tenants. It seemed to me to 
preach the most pregnant lesson of Irish difficulty and 
Irish rehef. The Prime Minister of Austria, as all the 
world knows, is a man of pre-eminent ability, of extra- 
ordinary power in the management of international 
questions, of profound and magnificent patriotism — to 
Austria. But engrossed as he is in the great question 
of how the peace of Europe is to be preserved with 
the position of Russia on one hand and Germany on 
the other, how is he to perform his part as an Irish 
citizen toward the people who are dependent upon him 
for support or encouragement, for that sympathy which 
should flow between him who holds the land, and him 
who tills it for a price? The world has come to recog- 
nize that property has its obligations as well as labor. 
The world has come to recognize that he who has, if 
he would enjoy, must reciprocate with those who have 
not, and with those who are dependent upon him. But 
as all wealth springs from the earth, and as all national 
prosperity comes from the soil, if there is in any coun- 
try—as thank God there is not in ours — a system by 
which the tenant's title goes down from generation to 
generation, unless the lord is there in his castle — so 
that between the castle and the cottage there is an in- 
dissoluble tie, in sickness and in health, in poverty and 
prosperity, each sympathizing with the other's woes, 
each sharing in the other's joys — he has no place in that 
land, and the law should say to him, not : "We will 
strip you of your possessions without price" ; but "with 
a price that is fair, we will give them to the tillers of 
the soil." I was the other day — three weeks ago — in 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. 97 

an Irish city ; and as I was passing along the street, 
I saw on the Hntel of a door the emblems of mourning. 
There came out two solemn looking persons whom I 
judged from their conversation to be the doctor and his 
assistant. They walked along seeming to feel very bad 
over the misfortune that had befallen the family or the 
falling off of their revenues, but when they reached the 
opposite corner of the street, they turned, and one 
said to the other: "Mr. O'Flyn, we did the best we 
could." "Yes," says he, "Mr. O'Brien, and it was a 
melancholy pleasure." Now I have attended a great 
many funerals in my life ; I expect to attend a great 
many more ; and there are many obsequies to which I 
go which afford me a melancholy pleasure. I feel 
melancholy in outward aspect out of respect to my 
surroundings, and have great pleasure in the event ; and 
the funeral of the passion and the prejudice of England, 
which for ages have cursed Ireland, I shall attend with 
a melancholy pleasure. 

The difficulty about Ireland and the United States 
is, that while the Americans have talked — as we all have 
to talk upon the stump and platform, some of us for 
votes, and some of us because we feel it, about the 
rights and wrongs of Ireland — the difificulty with us has 
always been that we did not know what Irishmen 
wanted. We have reached an age when sentiment is 
gone. We are no longer a sentimental people. We 
have come to a period when passion can no longer be 
torn to tatters, unless there is a foundation for the cloth. 
When we believe a people to be suffering from tyranny 
and injustice, then we can be full of sentiment in our 
sympathies, and intensely practical in our assistance. 



98 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

In the divided councils of the past we could not learn 
what the Irish wanted for Ireland, but the full lesson 
has been taught us by the same great leader who has 
consolidated the opinions and the purposes of his coun- 
trymen — Charles Stewart Parnell. 

I doubt if the justice and strength of Mr. Parnell's 
position would have been so thoroughly understood, 
and so unanimously approved, by the American people, 
except for the conversion and resistless advocacy of an 
English statesman who has for years held the first place 
in our admiration and respect. Americans recognize 
genius everywhere, and neither race nor nationality is a 
barrier to their appreciation and applause. Beyond 
all other men in the Old World, one Englishman of 
supreme ability, of marvelous eloquence, and varied 
acquirements, has fired their imaginations and enthusi- 
asm — William E. Gladstone. 

During the fifty years he has been in public life, there 
have been other English statesmen as accomplished and 
eminent in many departments of activity and thought ; 
many whose home and foreign policies have received 
equal, if not greater, approval from their contempo- 
raries; two hundred years from now none of them 
will be remembered but Gladstone. His fame will rest 
upon the great achievement of having saved the Em- 
pire he loved from a policy based upon ignorance 
and prejudice which would have destroyed it, and the 
greater triumph of having liberated a noble people, 
for centuries oppressed, who will forever keep his name 
alive with their gratitude. 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. 99 



s 



VI. 

PEECH AT THE DINNER GiVEN BY MEMBERS OF 

THE Union League to the Hon. John Jay, on 
THE Occasion of his Seventieth Birthday, 
June 24, 1887. 



At one o'clock this morning, at their anniversary 
banquet, the veterans of the Army of the Potomac had 
adjourned, and the bummers had taken possession when 
I left that interesting assemblage to come here. It is 
a contrast. Though the hour is approaching that at 
which I departed from Saratoga last night, the guests 
apparently are not the same; and yet I came on pur- 
pose to be present here ; not to speak, for I am not on 
the programme, but to pay my respects to Mr. Jay. I 
don't know why it was that Mr. Choate should have 
begun these exercises by abusing me, and ended them 
by calling me up.- He alluded to the fact that his fees 
connected with the railroad over which I preside have 
not been satisfactory. There has been no dispute in 
the directory of that corporation in regard to those 
fees ; and the statement has not yet been made to the 
stockholders that the reduction of our dividend from 
eight to four per cent, has been on that account. When 
Choate came to me with this paper, I told him I signed 
it with great cheerfulness, and thought it was a very 
happy thing to do. But Choate said : "I have a greater 



lOO ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

and a larger meaning in this than a mere compliment 
to Mr. Jay. You know I never do anything without a 
fee. I want to establish the precedent that every ex- 
President of this Club, when he reaches seventy years 
of age, shall be given a banquet. Evarts will get one 
next year, and that goes into the firm. Jack Schultz 
ought to have had one eight or ten years ago; we 
will count back and include him. The next year I will 
come in. Twenty-five or thirty years from now you 
will have one." Of course I signed the paper. Now 
the most eminent pathologists, or medical men, have 
said that a man can live to almost any period if he only 
has an object in getting there. The medical fraternity 
of England say that Gladstone would have died years 
ago, except that he had a well-defined purpose in liv- 
ing ; and that he would have died two years ago if he 
had not determined first to liberate Ireland and estab- 
lish Home Rule; and that may carry him on a good 
many years. The medical faculty of Germany gave up 
Bismarck; but although he fixed the limit of his own 
life at a period now passed, his object was not accom- 
plished, and he is going on four or five years more. 
The Emperor of Germany had a great mission to carry 
out thirty-five years ago, which he said he would do in 
four or five years. It is not done yet, and he has vig- 
orously entered his ninety-second year. And so every 
ex-President of this Club has an opportunity to live to 
be seventy years of age now that he is sure of this din- 
ner; and every member of the association who is not 
President, hopes to be, and that carries him along. The 
life-insurance agents are lurking about our door-ways 
all the while, because they understand this perfectly. 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. lOI 

I have a special object in being here, which cannot be 
shared by any of the rest of you. Most of you hail from 
New England. A New England man cannot properly 
appreciate Mr. Jay. I hear so much from New Eng- 
land men about New England, that' I am inclined to 
think they deem it necessary on all public occasions to 
make an apology for the fact that they left New Eng- 
land. But I have the honor to have been born in the 
same county in this State with Mr. Jay. His father and 
mine were born there; and my grandfather and great- 
grandfather; and for four generations my ancestors and 
now myself have been rendering reverence, honor, and 
love to three generations of Jays. Westchester County 
had more to do of historical significance relating to the 
formation of this Republic and its liberties than many 
States, and all the other counties of New York put 
together. It contributed Gouverneur Morris, with all 
his genius for affairs, and his superb accomplishments; 
but it gave a greater man than Gouverneur Morris — John 
Jay. By his articles in Tlie Federalist he created the sen- 
timent which formed the loosely united colonies into a 
Republic, and a hundred years afterward put down the 
Rebellion and established forever that this is not a con- 
federacy of independent States, but a nation. By his 
learning, his constructive talents, and spotless purity, he, 
as its first Chief-Justice, gave to our highest judicial 
tribunal a dignity and character which have secured for 
it the profoundest confidence of our first and second 
century. 

I was riding yesterday around Saratoga Springs with 
General Sherman. We called at the house of a friend, 
and instantly the General's attention was occupied by 



I02 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

a beautiful girl. I have often noticed that it is the 
peculiarity of very eminent men, seventy years of age, 
that whenever the opportunity occurs, their attention is 
occupied by a beautiful girl. He said to her: "My 
dear young lady, if I could go back to your time of life 
and start once more with all your fresh, bright, and 
hopeful career, I would sacrifice all 1 am and have done, 
and take my chances again." I replied: "General, 
there is no man living who can share with you that 
sentiment. No one who has achieved what you have ; 
who has reached the borders of seventy years, and has 
behind him a glorious career which is part of the his- 
tory of his country, would be permitted by his country- 
men to blot it out and begin life again. Such a record 
is treasured among the best things we own and cherish 
and desire to transmit to our descendants." 

We would not have John Jay bury his past and be 
restored to youth to try once more his fortunes. We 
know that he would pass an honorable and useful life, 
but in five hundred years the opportunity miight not 
occur again for him to render such an incalculable ser- 
vice to humanity. It is one of the glories of our time 
that his character and courage protected tlie poor and 
helpless against prejudice and passion, and that he lived 
to see the victory of that liberty to which he had de- 
voted his talents and his fortune. All of us his friends, 
and proud to be so numbered, we stand about him to- 
night paying, in our individual ways, and according to 
our several relations, our heartfelt tributes. We honor 
him for his unselfish devotion to a noble but unpopular 
cause, for his public services, for his work in this Club, 
and we love and revere him as a man. 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. 1 03 



VII. 

ADDRESS DELIVERED AT KINGSTON, JULY 30, 1 877, 
AT THE Centennial Celebration of the For- 
mation OF THE Government of the State of 
New York. 



Fellow Citizens: 

Centennial celebrations crowd upon us. Appropri- 
ate commemorations of events of the Revolutionary- 
period are the pleasure and duty of the year. Most of 
them are upon historic battle-fields, and recall the feats 
of arms of our victorious ancestors. 

The occasion which calls us together has deeper sig- 
nificance than any battle. It is the anniversary of the 
declaration and establishment of those principles of con- 
stitutional liberty, without which the Continental sol- 
dier had fought and died in vain. The story of the 
formation and expression of popular opinion upon popu- 
lar rights during the colonial era, its development in 
the Constitution of 1777, and its results for a century, 
can only be sketched in the limits of an address. Un- 
like the other colonies. New York had no chartered 
rights ; there were no limitations on the royal preroga- 
tive, and it was only by long and continued struggles 
that any immunities or privileges were secured. 

The Dutch had brought with them from Holland 
ideas of toleration and liberty, of which that country 



I04 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

was for a time the only asylum in the world ; the Eng- 
lish colonists were firm in their devotion to representa- 
tive government. By every process short of revolution 
during the early period of the English rule, the arbi- 
trary exactions of the royal Governors were resisted, and 
the demands for an Assembly of the people never 
ceased. The claim was based upon the natural and in- 
herent rights of a free people. 

In 1683 the Home Government, unable longer to re- 
sist, called together an Assembly elected by the people. 
It was the dawn of representative government in New 
York. The first Assembly of our ancestors immediate- 
ly asserted and enacted into laws the fundamental prin- 
ciples of civil liberty. They passed laws for a triennial 
Assembly ; they declared all power to vest in the Gover- 
nor, Council, and people met in General Assembly. 
The privileges of members of Parliament were conferred 
upon the Assembly and its members; their consent 
must be had to the levy of any tax, and all the guaran- 
tees contained in Magna Charta, in the Bill of Rights, 
in the habeas corpus act, together with trial by jury, 
and freedom of conscience in matters of religion, were 
declared to be the rights, liberties, and privileges of the 
inhabitants of New York. They created the town- 
ship — that school of self-government— provided the 
civil divisions upon the plan which has substantially 
prevailed ever since, and organized superior and inferior 
courts for the administration of justice. The rights 
and liberties thus established were often violated and 
arbitrarily suspended or denied, but every repetition of 
such tyranny only served to inflame to passionate de- 
votion the people's love of liberty, and to prepare the 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. 1 05 

way for the Declaration of Independence. Ninety- 
three years after this memorable assertion of popular 
rights, petition and remonstrance having alike failed, 
the people determined to peril life and fortune to main- 
tain and enlarge them. In 1776 New York was with- 
out a regular government. The Council was dissolved ; 
the General Assembly prorogued, and the royal Gover- 
nor a fugitive under the protection of the guns of the 
British fleet. 

The Provincial Congress sitting in New York owed 
its existence to the necessities of the times. It was a 
revolutionary body, its only charter and election by the 
people. On the 15th of May of that year the Conti- 
nental Congress, then sitting in Philadelphia, adopted 
a resolution requesting the respective assemblies and 
conventions of the United Colonies, "where no govern- 
ment sufficient for the exigencies of their affairs had 
been established, to adopt such government as should 
in the opinion of the representatives of the people best 
conduce to the happiness and safety of their constitu- 
ents in particular and America in general." They also 
recommended the suppression of all authority derived 
from the Crown of Great Britain, and the assumption 
and exercise of government under authority from the 
people of the colonies. Of the thirteen colonies, all ex- 
cept Rhode Island and Connecticut adopted the recom- 
mendation. Their charters did not reserve to the 
Crown the control over or veto upon their internal af- 
fairs, and with them such action was unnecessary. Vir- 
ginia's Constitution was first, and New York's fifth, in 
the order of adoption. 

A few days after the passage of this resolution the 



lo6 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

Provincial Congress met in New York; Gouverneur 
Morris, a delegate from the County of Westchester, 
then but twenty-four years of age, signalized his en- 
trance into public life by urging immediate action, in a 
speech remarkable for its courage and radicalism, and 
its strong presentation of the thought of the time. He 
boldly declared that reconciliation with the Mother 
Country was a delusion ; liberty and security could 
only be had by independent government ; and moved 
that a committee be appointed to draw up a plan for 
the frame of the government. These men, acting upon 
well-understood principles, and jealous of every assump- 
tion of power, thought that this Congress was not 
elected for this purpose, 

A committee was finally appointed, to whom the 
whole subject was referred, and on the 27th of May 
they reported "that the right of framing, creating, or 
remodeling civil governments, is and ought to be in 
the people" ; that the old form of government was dis- 
solved, and a new form was absolutely necessary ; and 
that, as doubts existed whether the Provincial Congress 
had power to act, the people of the colony be called to 
elect a new Congress specially instructed upon the 
question of a new government. This report is remarka- 
ble as the earliest, clearest, and most emphatic declara- 
tion of the doctrine of popular sovereignty. It was 
New York's contribution to American liberty, learned 
by more than half a century of incessant struggle of the 
representatives elected by the people with the repre- 
sentatives of the royal power. 

The report of the committee was adopted, and on 
the 31st a series of resolutions, prepared by Mr. Jay, 



CltAUNCEY M. DEPEIV. 107 

was passed, calling upon the several counties to elect 
a new body, with power to form a new government, 
and instructed also upon the question of united colonial 
independence. In the mean time the seat of war was 
transferred to New York., On Sunday afternoon of the 
30th of June the British fleet and army under Lord 
Howe having entered the harbor, the Congress, appre- 
hensive of an attack by the enemy, resolved that the 
next Congress should meet at White Plains, in the 
County of Westchester, and adjourned. On the 9th of 
July, 1776, the newly elected delegates met at the court- 
house in that place and elected General Woodhull Presi- 
dent, and John McKesson and Robert Berrian Secre- 
taries. During the forenoon a letter was received from 
the delegates of New York in the Continental Congress, 
inclosing the Declaration of American Independence, 
which had been adopted on the 4th. It was immedi- 
ately read and referred to a committee, consisting of 
Messrs. Jay, Yates, Hobart, Brashier, and Wm. Smith. 
It was a critical moment for these men. They had 
been just elected; only a few hours had elapsed since 
they had qualified and entered upon their duties, and 
now their first legislative act was to make up their rec- 
ord upon an issue which, if successful, made them pa- 
triots; if it failed, traitors and felons. How firm was 
their resolve, how clear their purpose, how serene 
their minds, is evidenced by the fact that on the after- 
noon of the same day the committee reported resolu- 
tions concurring in the Declaration, fully adopting it, 
and instructing our delegates in the General Congress 
to support the same, and give their united aid to all 
measures necessary to obtain its object. 



loS ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

The Convention immediately adopted the report. 
On the morning of the next day — the loth of July — 
this body "Resolved and ordered, that the style and 
title of this House be changed from that of the 'Provin. 
cial Congress of the Colony of New York,' to that of 
'The Convention of the Representatives of the State of 
New York';" and thus on the loth day of July, 1776, 
the State of New York was born. In the afternoon of 
the loth, they resolved to enter on the i6th upon the 
formation of a State government ; but by that time the 
situation of affairs here became too alarming for deliber- 
ation. Washington was contemplating the abandon- 
ment of New York. British ships of war were anchored 
off Tarrytown, within six miles of where they were sit- 
ting. Their whole attention was occupied in raising 
troops and supplies, and providing for the public order. 
On the i6th they postponed the question till the ist of 
August. In the mean while they provisionally ordained 
that all magistrates and civil officers well affected to- 
ward independence, continue the exercise of their duties 
until further orders, except that all processes thereafter 
must issue in the name of the State of New York; and 
declared it to be treason and punishable with death for 
any one living within the State and enjoying the pro- 
tection of its laws to adhere to the cause of the King 
of Great Britain or levy war against the State in his be- 
half. 

With dangers threatening on every hand, the British 
fleet in possession of New York Bay, the Hudson 
River, and Long Island Sound, a veteran army in over- 
whelming numbers but a few miles distant, thus boldly 
and fearlessly did the Representatives of New York 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. 1 09 

assert her sovereignty. On the 27th of July the Con- 
vention found it necessary to remove to Harlem, and 
there, on the ist of August, on motion of Gouverneur 
Morris, and seconded by Mr. Duer, a committee was ap- 
pointed to prepare and report a constitution or form of 
government. 

This committee was composed of the most eminent 
men in the Convention and in the Commonwealth. For 
a generation after independence was achieved a ma- 
jority of them continued to receive, in positions of honor 
and trust, the highest marks of the confidence and affec- 
tion of their countrymen. Their labors in the Cabinet 
and in Congress, in the State Legislature and upon the 
Bench, and in the Diplomatic Service, form the bright- 
est pages in the history of the Nation and the State. 

John Jay was Chairman, and his associates were 
Gouverneur Morris, Robert R. Livingston, William 
Duer, Abraham and Robert Yates, General Scott, 
Colonel Broome, Mr. Hobart, Colonel De Witt, Samuel 
Townshend, William Smith, and Mr. Wisner. The 
committee were to report on the i6th of August, 1776; 
but such was the perilous condition of the State, and 
so manifold the duties of the members of the Conven- 
tion, that no report was made till March, 1777. The 
Convention meanwhile, by the alarming situation of af- 
fairs, was migrating from place to place, and perform- 
ing every class of public duty. It was a Committee of 
Public Safety ; it was providing the ways and means to 
continue the contest ; its members were now serving in 
the Continental Congress, and again with the army; 
they were acting as judges and negotiators. To-day 
they were flying before the enemy, to-morrow furnish- 



no ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

ing protection for the sorely pressed Commonwealth. 
At one time meeting at Kingsbridge, then at Odell's in 
Philips' Manor, then at Fishkill, Poughkeepsie, and 
finally at Kingston. At Fishkill they supplied them- 
selves with arms and ammunition, and thereafter legis- 
lated with their swords by their sides — literally build- 
ing the peaceful fabric of constitutional government 
in the very presence of the alarms, the perils, and 
the carnage of war. On the 6th of March, 1777, at 
Kingston, the committee appointed to prepare a 
form of government were required to report on 
the following Wednesday, and that day, the 12th, 
the committee made a report which was read by 
Mr. Duane. 

The draft was drawn by John Jay, and is in his hand 
writing. This draft was under discussion until the 20th 
of April, and underwent some amendments and addi- 
tions. The leading minds in the debates, and in the 
introduction of the amendments adopted, were John 
Jay, Gouverneur Morris, Robert R. Livingston, and 
Mr. Duane. The Constitution, however, was finally 
passed almost as it came from the hands of Mr. Jay, 
and was adopted with one dissenting voice on the 20th 
of April, 1777. It was the evening of Sunday; the 
President, General Ten Broeck, was absent, and also 
the Vice-President, General Pierre Van Cortlandt ; but 
revolutions know neither days nor individuals. General 
Leonard Gansevoort, acting as President pro tan., at- 
tested the document. 

The same night Robert R. Livingston, General Scott, 
Gouverneur Morris, Abraham Yates, John Jay, and Mr. 
Hobart were appointed a committee to report a plan 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPElV. ill 

for organizing and establishing the form of govern- 
ment. They next directed one of the secretaries to pro- 
ceed immediately to Fishkill, and have five hundred 
copies of the Constitution, without the preamble, and 
twenty-five hundred with the preamble, printed, and 
instructed him to give gratuities to the workmen to 
have it executed with dispatch. They then resolved 
that the Constitution should be published on the next 
Tuesday, in front of the court-house, at Kingston ; and 
the village committee were notified to prepare for the 
event. This latter body seem expeditiously and eco- 
nomically to have performed their duty by erecting a 
platform upon the end of a hogshead, and from this, 
Vice-President Van Cortlandt presiding, Robert Ber- 
rian, one of the secretaries, read this immortal docu- 
ment to the assembled people. The Convention hav- 
ing promulgated their ordinance for the formation of 
the State Government, and filled up, provisionally, the 
offices necessary for carrying it on until an election 
could be had, and appointed thirteen of their number 
to act as a Committee of Safety until the Legislature 
should assemble, adjourned sine die on the 13th of May, 
1777. Thus passed into history this remarkable con- 
vention. In lofty patriotism, steadfastness of purpose, 
practical wisdom, and liberal statesmanship, it had few, 
if any, equals, even among the legislative bodies of ex- 
traordinary merit which marked the era. Its address 
to the people, drafted by Jay, and declared by Jefferson 
the ablest document of the period, is a most compact 
and eloquent statement of the fundamental princi- 
ples of free government, and was republished by Con- 
gress for the whole coun/^ry, and translated into foreign 



112 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

tongues. Of the many distinguished men who were 
its members three stand out conspicuously, and form an 
unequaled triumvirate of social distinction, character, 
culture, and intellect. They were John Jay, Gouverneur 
Morris, and Robert Livingston. All young men, pos- 
sessing the best education of the time, belonging to the 
wealthiest families in the State, by birth and opportu- 
nity certain of royal favor, and having the largest stake 
in loyalty and stable government ; they yet risked all, 
and periled their lives, for civil liberty and self-govern- 
ment. John Jay became Governor, and Cabinet Minis- 
ter, and Foreign Envoy, and the first Chief-Justice of 
the United States. Gouverneur Morris distinguished 
himself in the councils of the nation and the diplomatic 
service of the country. Robert R. Livingston rendered 
the most eminent services, both to this State and the 
United States, and in foreign courts. Their examples, 
efforts, and contributions in educating and nerving the 
colonies to the Declaration of Independence, in the 
events which led to the recognition of the Republic, 
and in moulding the internal regulations and foreign 
policy of the new Government, are the special pride of 
New York and the glory of the nation. No one can 
to-day read the Constitution of 1777 without wonder- 
ing how little we have been able to improve upon it 
in one hundred years. When we consider that purely 
representative government was then an almost untried 
experiment, this instrument becomes more and more 
an enduring monument to the wisdom and foresight of 
its framers. It begins with a preamble setting forth 
the causes which led to the formation of a separate gov- 
ernment, and the authority conferred upon the Con- 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. it% 

vention by the people to do this work. It recites at 
length the Declaration of Independence, and the unani- 
mous resolution of the Convention on the 9th of July, 
1776, indorsing the Declaration and instructing the 
New York delegates in the Continental Congress to 
give it their support. By virtue of which several acts 
and recitals, says the preamble, "All power whatever in 
the State hath reverted to the people thereof, and this 
Convention hath, by their suffrages and free choice, 
been appointed and authorized to institute and estab- 
lish such a government as they shall deem best calcu- 
lated to secure the rights and liberties of the good 
people of this State." 

Its first section, which was unanimously agreed to, is 
the keynote of its spirit. It ordained, determined, and 
declared that no authority, on any pretense whatever, 
should be exercised over the people or members of this 
State, but such as should be derived from and granted 
by the people. The declarations of 1683 were to secure 
for British colonists every liberty granted by the Crown 
to the British subject. The purpose of the men of 
1777 was to substitute the popular will for the royal 
prerogative, and natural rights for charters wrung from 
the reluctant hands of hereditary power. 

Their experience with the colonial Governors had 
made them jealous and suspicious of individual authori- 
ty, and so, to prevent the passage of laws inconsistent 
with the spirit of the Constitution or the public good, 
they placed the veto power in the hands of a council of 
revision, consisting of the Governor, the Chancellor, 
and the Judges of the Supreme Court. All bills passed 
by the Legislature were to be submitted to them, and 



ii4 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

their veto was absolute, unless the bill was repassed by 
two-thirds of each House. 

It followed the English model in its Legislature, and 
created two bodies, Senate and Assembly, and vested 
in them all legislative power. The Senate, twenty- 
four in number, was to be elected for four years by the 
freeholders of their districts having freeholds of the 
value of over one hundred pounds, and the Assembly 
of seventy members for one year, by freeholders pos- 
sessing freeholds of the value of twenty pounds, or 
renting tenements of the yearly value of twenty shil- 
hngs and paying taxes. Provision was made for increas- 
ing both branches, but the Senate was never to exceed 
one hundred, or the Assembly three hundred. It was 
the universal belief of the time that those who paid the 
taxes and supported the Government should govern. 
Universal suffrage was not deemed an inherent right, 
but a privilege to be hedged about with restrictions and 
limitations; and while we have enlarged the limit, our 
legislation has always held to the theory, until recent- 
ly, as to people of color, and still as to women, and 
minors, and others. It was the change of sentiment on 
this great question which led to the Convention and 
new Constitution of 1821. The executive power was 
vested in a governor and lieutenant-governor, to be 
chosen for three years, and to this term we have returned 
by an amendment adopted in 1874. The judicial power 
was vested in a chancellor, and judges of the Supreme 
Court ; and local county courts and a probate judiciary 
were constituted ; and they respectively held during 
good behavior, and until sixty-five years of age; while 
a final appellate court, both in law and equity, was 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEVV. 115 

formed by the Senate, the Chancellor, and the Judges 
of the Supreme Court. Says the most eminent au- 
thority of our time: "The first New York judiciary 
administered public justice and protected private rights 
during the whole period of its existence, in a manner 
which satisfied our people and won applause from all 
disinterested observers." 

The appointing power was vested in a council of ap- 
pointment, consisting of four senators, selected annual- 
ly by the Assembly who, with the Governor, were to 
form the council. To this body was given the appoint- 
ment and removal of all officers in the State, except the 
chancellor, judges of the Supreme Court, and first 
judges of counties. As the State increased in wealth 
and population, the power and patronage of this coun- 
cil became enormous. It controlled the politics of the 
Commonwealth for forty years, and, at the time of its 
abolishment, had within its gift fifteen thousand offices. 
Such parts of the common law of England and the 
statute law of Great Britain and the colony of New 
York, not inconsistent with the independence of the 
State, as were in force on the 19th day of April, 1775, 
were declared to be the law of New York, thus deliber 
ately fixing in the fundamental law the day when the 
British soldiers fired upon the patriots at Lexington as 
the close forever of the supremacy of British authority. 

The manner of voting was the subject of much dis- 
cussion in the Convention. The object was to get the 
freest and most unbiased expression of the popular will. 
At first the advocates of the viva voce vote seem to 
have had the majority ; but this Convention was won- 
derfully free from prejudice, or pride of opinion, or 



Il6 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

slavery to precedent. As stated in the Constitution, 
their object was to do that which best "would tend to 
preserve the liberty and equal freedom of the people." 
They were willing to fairly try any reasonable experi- 
ment. While the vote by ballot was negatived by two- 
thirds, a compromise was adopted by thirty-three to 
three, ordaining that, after the termination of the war, 
the Legislature should provide for all elections by bal- 
lot, and if after full and fair trial, it was found less con- 
ducive to the safety and interest of the State, the viva 
voce practice might be restored. In 1787 the requisite 
law was enacted for voting by ballot, and that method 
has continued ever since. 

The question of religious tolerance excited great in- 
terest and the longest debate. By personal experience 
and family tradition these men were very familiar with 
the results of bigotry and intolerance. With the ex- 
ception of Holland, there was scarcely a place in the 
world where religious freedom was permitted. John 
Jay, true to his Huguenot recollections and training, 
threw the weight of his great influence and ability on 
the side of restriction. He moved to "except the pro- 
fessors of the religion of the Church of Rome, until 
they should take oath that they verily believed that no 
pope, priest, or foreign authority hath power to absolve 
the subjects of the State from allegiance, and unless 
they renounce the false, wicked, and damnable doc- 
trine that the pope has power to absolve men from their 
sins" ; this having been voted down by nineteen to ten, 
it was then moved, "that this toleration shall not ex- 
tend to justify the professors of any religion in disturb- 
ing the peace or violating the laws of this State" ; this 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. 117 

too was rejected, and the Convention, to their immor- 
tal honor and glory, established liberty of conscience in 
these memorable words: "This Convention doth, in 
the name and by the authority of the good people of 
this State, ordain, determine, and declare that the free 
exercise and enjoyment of religious profession and wor- 
ship, without discrimination or preference, shall forever 
hereafter be allowed within this State to all mankind." 
Thomas Jefferson forced a like expression from Vir- 
ginia, but with that exception. New York alone among 
the thirteen States began its existence with absolute 
and untrammeled religious liberty. 

The Constitution provided for the naturalization of 
foreigners, for trial by jury, for a militia service with 
recognition of the Quakers, and for the protection of 
Indians within the State limits. Acts of attainder were 
prohibited ; no person was to be disfranchised, except 
by law of the land or the judgment of his peers; free- 
dom of debate in legislative bodies was secured ; par- 
ties impeached or indicted for crimes were to be allowed 
counsel as in civil cases; and the Legislature were pro- 
hibited from instituting any court except such as should 
proceed according to the course of the common law. 

Pause for a moment and reflect upon the conditions 
under which this Constitution was prepared and adopted. 
Its framers in perpetual peril of their lives; at some 
period during their deliberations, every county in the 
State invaded by the enemy; devoting most of their 
time to the public defense and the protection of their 
families, without precedent to guide them, save the Eng- 
lish model, their own experience, and thoughtful study 
of the principles of liberty. "Our Constitution," said 



Il8 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

Mr. Jay, in his letter to the President of the Conven- 
tion, "is universally approved, even in New England, 
where few New York productions have credit." The 
verdict of posterity is unanimous and emphatic, that it 
deserves a high place among the few immortal docu- 
ments which attest and determine the progress of the 
people, and the growth and defense of human liberty. 
Its principal features were incorporated into the Con- 
stitution of the United States, and followed by a ma- 
jority of the new commonwealths, which from time to 
time were admitted into the Union. The men whose 
virtues we celebrate here to-day did not build better 
than they knew. It is the crowning merit of their work- 
that it fulfilled its purpose. The peril of their posi- 
tion ; the time, nearly the darkest and most hopeless of 
the Revolution; so purified their actions and intensi- 
fied their thoughts, that reason became almost prophecy. 
The brilliance of the promise is equaled by the splen- 
dor of the performance. The salient principles of the 
old Constitution underlie the new; and every present 
effort to abandon other experiments and restore the an- 
cient forms, is the best tribute posterity can pay to the 
marvelous wisdom of the members of our first State Con- 
vention. The Constitution of 1777 remained in force 
for over forty years, and then with some minor modi- 
fications, the extension of suffrage, and the concentra- 
tion of more power in the Governor, it continued sub- 
stantially unchanged until 1846. The public improve- 
ments of the State, its growth in population, and local 
necessities, demanded some amendments; and to pro- 
vide for the public debt, and limit the debt-contracting 
power, and to enlarge the judiciary, the Convention of 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEIV. 119 

1846 was called together. While preserving many of 
the essential features of the old Constitution, this Con- 
vention made changes which radically altered our 
scheme of State administration. The Governor was 
stripped of nearly all power, the authority of the Legis- 
lature was restricted, and appointments to ofifice and 
local administration given directly to the people. The 
whole civil service, which for seventy years had been 
appointed by the Council of Appointment and the 
Governor and Senate, was reduced to elective offices. 
The Judiciary, which had been selected by the Execu- 
tive, and held its place during good behavior, was sub- 
mitted to popular nomination and election, and very 
short terms of service. The whole instrument is a 
protest against the concentration of power in any 
branch of the Government, and a demand for its sur- 
render at the shortest possible intervals by the execu- 
tive, the legislative, and the judicial officers, back again 
to the people. It cut up and subdivided, for the elec- 
tion of the Legislature, the large districts, with their 
guarantee of larger men for representatives, and made 
statesmanship difficult in proportion as it multiplied the 
opportunities and increased the influence of the local 
politician. It so widely distributed official authority 
and responsibility that each soldier of a vast army of 
placemen was accountable only to the hazards of a re- 
election at the end of a brief term, and the Governor 
was the head of an administration beyond the reach of 
appointment, removal, or control by him. The wisdom 
of the revolution, especially in the Judiciary, has never 
ceased to be doubted, and within the past five years, by 
duly adopted amendments, more permanency and dig- 



I20 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

nity have been given to our higher and appellate courts, 
by reorganizing them upon a more harmonious basis, 
with more symmetry and concentration, and longer 
terms of service. The tendency of recent constitu- 
tional reform has been to old methods in respect to the 
Executive, both in regard to his length of service and 
general powers, and happily to drive from the Legis- 
lature special legislation for the benefit of individuals, 
corporations, or localities, and compel the enactment 
of such general laws as will bear equally in both grant 
and hmitation upon all, giving to none the exclusive 
benefits and franchises of the State. But the methods 
provided by the Constitution of 1846 to preserve the 
credit of New York, to reform and simplify the practice 
and codify the laws, are worthy of all praise, and have 
been adopted by a large number of the other States. 
Let us hope that very soon our fundamental law may 
be still further amended to stop the increase of local 
and municipal debt — the source and fountain of extrav- 
agance, peculation, and fraud, and the greatest curse 
of our time. [The law has since been so amended.] 

This brief review of our constitutional history leads 
naturally to an inquiry as to what practical results have 
been obtained by these principles and plans of govern- 
ment. The first election for State officers and mem- 
bers of the Legislature was held in June, 1777, in all the 
counties not in possession of the enemy, by the officers 
appointed by the Convention. A majority of the Coun- 
cil of Safety sought to control the matter by nominat- 
ing Philip Schuyler for Governor, and George Clinton 
for Lieutenant-Governor. As Jay said, in proclaiming 
these nominations: "Our Constitution is universally 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. 121 

approved and does honor to our State. Let us not lose 
our credit in committing the government of it to men 
inadequate to the task. These gentlemen are respecta- 
ble abroad ; their attachment to the cause is confessed, 
and their abilities unquestionable. Let us endeavor to 
be as unanimous as possible." Notwithstanding this 
powerful nomination, forty-one candidates ran, 13,179 
votes were cast, and General George Clinton was 
elected both Governor and Lieutenant-Governor. He 
resigned the latter office, and General Pierre Van Cort- 
landt, as President of the Senate, became Lieutenant- 
Governor. 

The newly-elected Governor was cast in the mould 
of the sternest and most inflexible patriotism. The 
highest office in the gift of the people had come to him 
unsolicited, but he hesitated long before accepting it. 
Regardless of personal sacrifice or ambition, he wanted 
first clearly to see whether his duty to the cause could 
be best performed in the field or the executive chair. 
The Council of Safety, restive under their great respon- 
sibilities, demanded that he immediately leave his com- 
mand and assume the helm of state. Washington and 
Putnam advised his acceptance, and among the expres- 
sions of opinion from all quarters, the Consistory of the 
Dutch Reformed Church, at Kingston, addressed him 
a most earnest appeal and congratulation. "From the 
beginning of the present war," they said, "the Consis- 
tory and people of Kingston have uniformly been at- 
tached to the cause of America, and justify, upon the 
soundest principles of religion and morality, the glori- 
ous revolution of a free and oppressed country. Take, 
then, with the acclamation and fullest confidence of the 



122 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

public — take, sir, the Government into your hands, and 
let the unsolicited voice of the whole State prevail upon 
you to enter upon this arduous task. The Consistory 
esteem themselves especially happy in having cause to 
believe that religious liberty, without which all other 
privileges are not worth enjoying, will be strenuously 
supported by your Excellency." 

He yielded his own judgment to the universal anxi- 
ety, and the 30th of July, 1777, was fixed for the inau- 
guration. And so, one hundred years ago to-day, upon 
this spot, the Council of Safety surrendered its powers, 
General George Clinton was inaugurated Governor, and 
the State of New York, under a Constitution and duly 
organized Government, began its history. He came 
from the very presence of the enemy to assume the 
robes of office, to return to his post when the ceremony 
was over ; and the proclamation which made him Gover- 
nor, General and Commander of the Militia, and Ad- 
miral of the Navy of the State, was the first state paper 
bearing the startling attest "God save the People." 
Forts Clinton and Montgomery were attacked in the 
Highlands, Herkimer was battling in the Valley of the 
Mohawk, Burgoyne was marching from the north, and 
it was months before he could summon from the field 
and gather in council the first Legislature. 

New York had but two hundred thousand people ; 
was without manufactories or internal improvements; 
and hemmed in and invaded on every side by hostile 
fleets and armies. One hundred years have passed, and 
to-day in the Sisterhood of States, she is the Empire in 
all that constitutes a great commonwealth. An indus- 
trious, intelligent, and prosperous population of five 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. 1 23 

millions of people live within her borders. In the value 
of her farms and farm products, and in her manufactur- 
ing industries, she is the first State in the Union. She 
sustains over one thousand newspapers and periodicals, 
has eighty millions invested in church property, and 
spends twelve millions of dollars a year upon popular 
education. Upward of three hundred academies and 
colleges fit her youth for special professions and furnish 
opportunities for liberal learning and the highest cul- 
ture, and stately edifices all over the State, dedicated 
to humane and benevolent objects, exhibit the perma- 
nence and extent of her organized charities. There 
are three hundred millions of dollars in her savings 
banks; three hundred millions in her insurance compa- 
nies, and five hundred millions in the capital and loans 
of her State and National Banks. Six thousand miles 
of railroads, costing six hundred millions of dollars, 
have penetrated and developed every accessible corner 
of the State, and maintain against all rivalry and com- 
petition her commercial prestige. 

In 1825 a cannon was fired upon the Battery in New 
York City, in response to the reverberations of the guns 
from Sandy Hook ; its echoes were caught and repeated 
by another shot at the Palisades; and so from Tappan 
Zee to the Highlands, and along the Catskills and the 
Valley of the Mohawk, and passed the falls of the Gene- 
see, till lost over the lake at Buffalo, the thunders of 
artillery announced, in one hour and twenty minutes, 
the whole length of the State, that the waters of the 
lake had been wedded to the ocean, and the Erie Canal 
was completed. It marked a new era in the prosperity 
of the State and the history of the Nation. It sent the 



124 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

tide of emigration to the Northwest, developing there 
great agricultural States, and added immensely to the 
wealth of New York. All honor and gratitude to the 
men who at that early day had the courage and fore- 
sight to plan and pursue these great public improve- 
ments, and whose wisdom has been proven by a repeti- 
tion of the lessons of the ages, that along the highways 
of commerce reside population, wealth, civilization, and 
power. The glory of each State is the common prop- 
erty of the Nation, and we make this day our centennial 
exhibit. Our inquiry has shown that we need not step 
beyond our own boundaries to find illustrious annals 
and noble examples. We are rich in battle-fields, de- 
cisive in results upon the freedom of the Nation. 

Jay, Morris, and Livingston, Schuyler and Mont- 
gomery, Clinton and Herkimer, Hamilton and Kent, 
are names which will live among the soldiers, patriots, 
and sages of all time. In every crisis of its history, the 
virtue, courage, and wisdom of the people have been 
equal to the needs of the present and the wants of the 
future. 

Let us welcome the second century and enter upon 
its duties with the stern purpose and high resolve to 
maintain the standard of our fathers in the public and 
private life of the State, and the honorable superiority 
of New York in the Federal Union. 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. 1 25 



o 



VIII. 

RATION AT THE ACADEMY OF MuSIC, NeW YORK, 

ON Decoration Day, May 30, 1879. 



Veterans, Ladies, and Gentlemen : 

The occasion which calls us together is the most in- 
teresting of our national celebrations. While others 
appeal to our pride or recall the recollections of a his- 
toric past, the events of to-day form a part of our own 
experience, revive the sorrows and sufferings we all in- 
dividually and collectively have felt, and recall those 
whose loss touched and stirred the deepest and tender- 
est emotions of the heart. But while the associations 
of the day are so sacred and personal, we cannot give 
all its hours to the luxury of grief, or surrender our- 
selves entirely to the waves of sentiment. The time 
has come, and as the years elapse it will be more and 
more important that, mingling with our recollections 
and eulogies, should be told the story of the causes of 
the great contest, the issues which it decided, and 
the results which have been attained. 

At the Centennial Exhibition was a picture remarka- 
ble for its naturalness and the story it portrayed. It 
was the Battle of Monmouth. An aged fifer, his gray 
locks streaming in the wind, with eager step was lead- 
ing his company on to the fray. A drummer boy by 



126 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

his side was looking anxiously into the old man's eyes, 
and catching from him the tune and the step of the 
music of liberty. So upon this day, from the lives and 
the deeds of the men who fell in the great Civil War, from 
the causes for which they died and the results which they 
achieved, we take our step and learn our lesson of how 
to preserve and perpetuate the union of these States. 

We are one of the most fortunate of the generations 
of man. While others have passed their peaceful and 
eventless lives without incident and without history, it 
has been our lot to witness some of the mightiest events 
of all time ; to participate in the discussion of the grand- 
est questions which have ever agitated a people, and 
to take part in the conflict and decide the issue which 
settled the destiny of humanity and liberty upon this 
continent. 

Eighteen years have passed since the first gun was 
fired at Sumter; fourteen since Lee surrendered at Ap- 
pomatox; and yet so rapid has been the stride of opin- 
ion and the march of ev^ents, that this great struggle 
seems already relegated to a dim and historic past. 
But around our knees, about our chairs, and in this 
audience are gathered the eager upturned faces of those 
who are to be the future citizens of the Republic, ask- 
ing: "What is the meaning of these ceremonials? Why 
are flowers strewn upon these graves? Why this gath- 
ering of the people together? For what did these men 
fight and die?" 

The answer to these questions is necessary now, and 
will become more necessary every year, to keep alive 
in the national mind the value of our institutions and 
their tremendous cost. Our forefathers, great and wise 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. I27 

as they were, committed a fatal error in the formation 
of the Republic, when they crippled freedom by a com- 
promise with slavery. While proclaiming in noble lan- 
guage and lofty spirit that "all men are created free and 
equal ; that they are endowed by their Creator with 
certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, 
liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," the only answer 
the American citizen had for seventy years to the sneer 
of the monarchist was a blow or a blush. For the pres- 
ervation of that institution, opinions were inculcated 
and measures proposed which for three-quarters of a 
century imperiled the existence of the Union. It was 
the cancer in the body politic, which until it was cut 
out by the Civil War, constantly threatened to destroy 
the national life. To protect, extend, and preserve it 
the men most interested taught to three generations of 
the people of the States where it existed the heresy of 
secession, the idea of extreme state rights; the opin- 
ion that the State was superior to the General Govern- 
ment, that the allegiance of the citizen was to his State 
first, and his country afterward, and that the sovereign 
State at any time of its own motion could dissolve the 
compact and set up for itself. This idea, enforced by 
the logic and eloquence of the ablest men, and but- 
tressed and fortified by necessity, came to be thorough- 
ly and honestly believed by a large portion of the 
American people. In 1820 it threatened the dissolu- 
tion of the Union, and the danger was only averted by 
compromise. In 1833 it sought to destroy the Repub- 
lic, and the Nation was saved by the indomitable will 
and the dauntless courage of Andrew Jackson. In 1850 
it threatened disunion, and was appeased by compro- 



128 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

mise. In 1854 it clamored for secession, and was again 
pacified by compromise. In i860 the people of the 
United States, under the forms of law and according 
to the Constitution, elected the President of their 
choice. By residence, association, and opinion, he was 
distasteful to the men interested in upholding the sys- 
tem of slavery, and they immediately plunged the 
country into the most tremendous and disastrous civil 
war of modern times. That contest was not a conflict 
of ambition, or aggression, or territorial aggrandize- 
ment ; it was a war of ideas. On the one side for three- 
quarters of a century had been cultivated a belief in 
the righteousness and rightfulness of human slavery and 
state rights; on the other, devotion to human liberty 
and nationality. These two ideas, with men of the 
same race, and of kindred blood behind them, met in 
deadly conflict upon the battle-field. The Almighty 
permitted that strife to rage for four years. He per- 
mitted a million men on one side and the other to lose 
their lives. He permitted twelve thousand millions of 
dollars worth of property to be squandered, lost, and 
destroyed : but when, by these tremendous sacrifices, 
the sin of the nation had been expiated, He set the 
seal of victory upon the side of nationality and liberty. 
When the contest was over, in the grave which was dug 
were buried the shackles of four millions of human 
beings, and the idea of secession and state rights; and 
upon it was builded a monument which will endure for- 
ever — to Nationality, Liberty, and the Rights of Man. 
From the battlements of Heaven to-night there look 
down upon us the spirits of both the Union and the 
Confederate dead. I believe that as together in the 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEIV. 129 

clearer light of the spirit land they see right and wrong, 
the Confederate and the Federal alike join with us in 
gratitude and thankfulness to Almighty God that the 
issue of the war was liberty and nationality, and not 
slavery and secession : and as a broader and healthier 
public sentiment prevails, both the North and the 
South, without regard to previous sectional associations 
or party affiliations, have come almost unanimously to 
the same opinion. 

We look back upon the scenes which transpired at 
the time of the beginning of the struggle with wonder 
and amazement. When its story is read a hundred 
years hence, it will be impossible to credit all its de- 
tails. On the one side the South had become the 
spoiled darling of the Nation ; it had devoted itself to 
politics and to the science of government ; it had exer- 
cised a controlling voice and influence in the national 
councils for two generations : it was proud, high-spirited, 
and aggressive. We were fond of saying to older and 
more aristocratic countries : We too have a class which 
lives by the labor of others, and which is born and edu- 
cated to govern. On the other hand, the North was 
given up to materialism ; it had devoted itself to the 
development of its material prosperity ; it was engaged 
in agriculture, in mining, in the mechanical arts, in 
industrial pursuits, and in the inventions; it was accu- 
mulating, and had accumulated, enormous wealth, was 
enjoying unparalleled prosperity, and living in the 
pleasures and the luxuries which flow from these results. 

All revolutions and all conspiracies against consti- 
tuted authority are brought about by minorities. It is 
because the minority are banded together for a single 



130 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

and common purpose. They have cut the bridges be- 
hind them. They have staked Hfe, Hberty, and prosper- 
ity on the issue. For them it is patriotism if they suc- 
ceed, treason and death if they fail ; and they carry 
with them, by the force of compact and energetic ear- 
nestness, all who share in their belief and are anxious 
for the success of their plans. Edward Everett has 
said that ten men precipitated the great rebellion of 
1 861 ; and it was precipitated for the purpose, as Alex- 
ander H. Stephens declared, of founding a new Govern- 
ment, in which the chief of the corner should be the 
stone which the original builders rejected. But all 
now see and acknowledge that had the rebellion suc- 
ceeded, instead of two Governments, there would have 
been a dozen ; and in the jealousies of little and con- 
tending sovereignties, security for property and life and 
all liberty would have been lost. 

When the world looked upon the combatants as they 
stood in i860 and 1861, with the South united and in- 
tent upon a single purpose ; with the North divided 
and devoted to money-making; they said: "Here on 
the one side is military skill and martial ardor, and on 
the other a nation of shopkeepers, and the end will not 
be doubtful." So anxious were we for peace and pros- 
perity, so accustomed to bluster and threats, that we 
saw the navy scattered so that only one ship of twenty 
guns remained in American waters, and entered no pro- 
test. We saw the army divided so that a regiment of 
regulars could not be got together, and we entered no 
protest. We saw the arsenals and forts denuded of arms 
and munitions of war, which were placed at points where 
they could be conveniently seized by drilling bands of 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. 131 

conspirators, and we entered no protest. We saw 
companies forming, regiments rendezvousing, armies 
mustering, and we did nothing. When a sovereign 
State protested against the Government putting troops 
into a national fort for its defense, we half admitted it 
was right. When the same State declared it to be an 
act of war for the troops in a Federal fort to defend it 
against seizure by the State, half of the North almost 
thought the defense was wrong. But we all remember 
that beautiful Sunday morning when the news was 
flashed over the country that the flag had been fired 
upon at Sumter. Instantly all apathetic elements and 
diverging opinions were cemented into one common 
mass, with one common resolve. The flag fired upon ! 
We had seen it floating from mastheads and public 
buildings, carried in processions and upon mimic battle- 
fields, and little knew how much tenderness and affec- 
tion were emblemed to us in its folds. We little knew 
that way down in the depths of our hearts was the be- 
lief that in the flag were symbolized the Republic and 
its Constitution, its institutions, its hberty, its glory, its 
past, its present, and its future. At first all were 
stunned ; then succeeded amazement, then indignation, 
and then a settled purpose that war should be waged 
until that flag was recognized and acknowledged as the 
emblem of the nation wherever it had ever waved. 
The shell of materialism dropped from the manhood of 
the North, and it stood forth spiritualized into purest 
patriotism. The manufactory was deserted, the plow 
was left in the furrow, the spade in the sod, the mining- 
tool in the shaft. The law-office was closed, the pulpit 
was empty, and without regard to previous opinions or 



132 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

party affiliations, a million of men marched forth to the 
defense of the country and the preservation of the 
Union. 

There was no malice, no vengefulness, no vindictive- 
ness in this vast array. The contest was not attended 
with the havoc, ravages, outrages, and sackings which 
have characterized other wars. There have been wars 
from the beginning of time, and will probably be until 
the end of time, but most of them were for ambition or 
to acquire territor}'. England waged one of her most 
expensive and destructive conflicts with Holland be- 
cause of an offensive picture in the Town Hall at 
Amsterdam. France carried on one of the most deso- 
lating wars in histor}-, making the homes of milhons of 
people a desert, that a corrupt minister might amuse a 
mishtv monarch. But this conflict was to preserve 
and not to destroy, and when it was ended the world 
saw how magnanimous a free people could be. The 
Republic bleeding at every pore held no state trials, 
closed no prison doors upon political offenders, reared 
no scaffolds amidst the ashes of the Rebellion, but said : 
"You are all equally the children of a common Govern- 
ment and the heirs of a common destiny, and all the 
benefits of free institutions, all the liberty, all the rights, 
and all the advantages which are possessed by those who 
fought to sustain the Union, shall be shared equally by 
those who fought to destroy it." This grand magnanim- 
ity ought to have cemented and consolidated the frag- 
ments of the Union, and built it up into a stronger and 
better nation than it had ever been before. In the 
fourteen years of reconciliation and of reconstruction 
there is much to be grateful for, and much to regret. 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. 133 

As always happens in great social disturbances, bad 
men, imported and native-born, taking advantage of the 
newly enfranchised and uneducated vote, seized upon 
the governments of those States to plunder and steal. 
On the other hand, the pardoned rebel, when power 
came into his hands, denied to the freedman the rights 
which had been so generously granted to himself and 
prevented the free exercise of the ballot. We can never 
have in this country permanent peace and the assun 
ance of settled and prosperous government until, on 
the one hand, public sentiment and the law can control 
and punish the state officer, the legislator, the judge, 
and the public official who is unfaithful to his trust; 
and, on the other hand, the voter is educated up to the 
fullest appreciation of and ability to exercise the price- 
less gift of the franchise, and the ballot-box is free from 
fraud and the ballot from intimidation. There must be 
an overwhelming public sentiment which will bury in a 
common grave the "carpet-bag" thief and the Con- 
federate "bulldozer." 

The distinction of the volunteer army (the graves of 
whose dead we strew to-day with flowers) over all other 
armies of all times, was its intelligence. Behind every 
musket was a thinking man. On the march, around 
the camp-fire, in the hospital and the prison, and in 
letters to friends at home, these men discussed the 
issues at stake, and the results which would follow de- 
feat or victory, with as much statesmanship and pro- 
phetic force as the representatives in Congress. Of the 
million volunteer soldiers, thousands were fitted by 
culture, ability, and character to be Presidents of the 
United States. Latour D'Auvergne was a grenadier of 



134 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

Napoleon's Old Guard. Bravest of the brave on every 
battle-field, he was tendered for distinguished services 
a sword bearing the inscription, "To the first grenadier 
of France"; but he refused it, saying: "Among us 
soldiers there is neither first nor last." Constantly 
declining promotion, and ever winning fresh laurels, he 
fell fighting gloriously for his country, and an imperial 
decree gave to him a distinction never enjoyed by the 
proudest marshals of the Empire. His name continued 
on the roll of his company, and when it was called the 
oldest sergeant answered : "Died on the field of honor." 
And this year and next, and for the next decade, and 
centuries after, on the anniversary of this day, when 
the roll-call in every churchyard and village cemetery of 
the men who died in the conflict is read, the answer of 
a grateful people will be: "Dead upon the field of 
honor." While thousands of Confederates, in that last 
moment when, upon the confines of eternity, the mind 
distinguishes more accurately the right from the wrong, 
confessed to themselves that they had spilt their blood 
upon the wrong side, there never was a Union soldier 
whose life ebbed away upon the field, whose last mo- 
ments were not comforted and consoled by the glorious 
and inspiring consciousness that he was dying for his 
country and his God. There is an old epitaph in an 
English churchyard which quaintly says that "he who 
saves, loses ; he who spends, saves ; and he who gives 
away, takes it with him." These men gave away their 
lives and took with them immortal glory, and the grati- 
tude of endless generations. They may repose in un- 
known graves south of the Potomac, or sleep beneath 
the sea, and yet theirs is a deathless fame. Poetry and 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. 1 35 

eloquence will embalm their memories and keep ever 
bright the recollection of their heroic deeds. They 
belong to the Grand Army of the elect, who, though 
they died before the cause had triumphed, yet their 
blood and sacrifice inspired those following to victory. 

They never fail who die 

In a great cause. The block may soak their gore ; 

Their heads may sodden in the sun, their limbs 

Be strung to city gates and castle walls ; 

But still their spirit walks abroad. Though years 

Elapse and others share as dark a doom, 

They but augment the deep and sweeping thoughts 

Which overpower all others, and conduct 

The world at last to freedom. 

If we should eliminate from history all its heroism 
and the story of its heroic deeds, how barren would be 
the record. The national spirit of Great Britain is kept 
alive to-day by her Marlboroughs, her Wellingtons, 
and her Nelsons. Rome lives not in her Empire, or in 
the centuries of her rule, but in the few great names 
whose deeds have been transmitted for example and 
encouragement. The ten thousand who at Marathon 
drove the Persian hordes into the sea, lit a fire the spark 
of which enkindled the flame three thousand years after- 
ward that expelled the Turk from the soil of Greece. 
The Barons at Runnymede wrested Magna Charta from 
King John. Magna Charta gave to the people a repre- 
sentation in the House of Commons. The House of 
Commons created Pym, Hampden, Sydney, and Crom- 
well, and the spirit of these men produced the Ameri- 
can Revolution. The shot which the embattled farmers 
fired at Lexington echoed " round the world," and pro- 
duced most of tho§e revolutions in all lands by which 



136 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

in the last hundred years power has fallen away from 
the throne and been gained by the people. It was the 
echo of that shot which in 1861 aroused the national 
spirit to the protection of the national life, and while 
Lexington founded the Republic, the memory of Lex- 
ington preserved it. 

To-day, of all days in the year, without criticism and 
without animosity, we can fight over those old battles. 
We can recall those great deeds and heroic sacrifices 
and pay our tribute to the men, living and dead, who 
did so much for us. All has been forgiven, but noth- 
ing should be forgotten. While memory lives this 
people will never tolerate the beginning, or tamely sub- 
mit to the organization, of another revolution, but will 
visit with swift and terrible wrath its aiders, abettors, 
and promoters. Representatives of the people who 
neglect the measures necessary to promote business 
and prosperity, to develop the resources and augment 
the power of the nation ; who forget that the true in- 
terests of the Republic are peace and liberty, intelligence 
and progress, and equality and inviolability of civil and 
political rights: who would stir up the old strifes, or 
attempt to defeat or nullify the results of the war, 
would better remember that the American people de- 
mand the preservation of the national honor, the sanc- 
tity of national pledges, the solid and substantial growth 
of national unity and wealth, and that there are ques- 
tions settled at fearful cost, which they will never per- 
mit to be reopened. 

To-day, we can with the old fire and fervor sweep 
with Sherman in his March to the Sea; stand by the 
grand Thomas while he is holding the enemy at bay; 



CHA UNCE V M. DEPE W. 1 3 7 

be with the chivalric McPherson as he falls at the front ; 
fight in the clouds on Lookout Mountain with gallant 
Joe Hooker ; follow that wonderful ride down the val- 
ley to Winchester, when the heroic Sheridan on foam- 
ing steed reformed his flying squadrons, and plucked 
victory from defeat ; sit with Farragut in the shrouds 
of his flagship at Mobile Bay, and look at that noblest 
of historical groupings when Lee surrendered his sword 
to Grant. 

Within the past year an American citizen has been 
received in foreign lands with unprecedented distinc- 
tion. Liberal and imperial, constitutional and auto- 
cratic governments, have vied with each oth^r in doing 
him honor. Kings and peoples of all nationalities — of 
Europe, of India, of China, and Japan — have received 
him as a national guest and greeted him wath en- 
thusiastic welcome. It is the tribute of the world to 
the power and genius of the reunited and disenthralled 
American Republic, and to the valor and prowess of 
the American soldier in the person of an ex-President 
of the United States, and the first captain of his time — 
Ulysses S. Grant. 

When the war was over, in the South, where, under 
warmer skies and with more poetic temperaments, sym- 
bols and emblems are better understood than in the 
practical North, the widows, mothers, and children of 
the Confederate dead went out and strewed their graves 
with flowers ; at many places the women scattered them 
impartially also over the unknown and unmarked rest- 
ing places of the Union soldiers. As the news of this 
touching tribute flashed over the North, it roused, as 
nothing else could have done, national amity and love, 



138 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

and allayed sectional animosity and passion. It thrilled 
every household where there was a vacant chair by the 
fireside, and an aching void in the heart for a lost hero 
whose remains had never been found ; old wounds broke 
out afresh, and in a mingled tempest of grief and joy 
the family cried, "Maybe it was our darling." Thus, out 
of sorrows, common alike to the North and the South, 
came this beautiful custom. But Decoration Day no 
longer belongs to those who mourn. It is the common 
privilege of us all, and will be celebrated as long as 
gratitude exists and flowers bloom. 

To-day, we can recall just for an instant our emotions 
when the drum of the recruiting sergeant sounded at 
every cross-roads and in every village street. The moth- 
er, the wife, the affianced bride at the station to bid 
good-by, half glad, half sorrowful. Then the weary 
days of waiting, the news of battle, the anxious scan- 
ning of the newspaper for the killed and wounded, the 
awful haste to the front for the remains, or to the hos- 
pital to attend the wounded and dying; and now the 
pride in the achievements and in the lives of those who 
survived, and this beautiful tribute to those who died. 

The Revolution of 1776 and the movement to repress 
the Rebellion of 1861 in their spirit and purpose stand 
together to-day, and with choicest garlands we wreathe 
the forms and enshrine the monuments of George 
Washington and Abraham Lincoln. The one, with a 
majesty of character unequaled in the annals of the 
race, was Father of his Country, and left to it the 
wisest utterances which ever came from an uninspired 
pen — his Farewell Address — for its guidance and its 
preservation. The other in his administration, in hi? 



CHA UNCE V M. DEPE IV. 139 

spirit, and in his death, fitly exhibits the devotion and 
sacrifices which preserved all that the first had founded. 
"With malice toward none and charity for all," let 
those who fought to maintain and those who fought to 
destroy, each seeing that the preservation of this 
Union is the common glory, the common benefit, and 
the common heritage of both, in the spirit of Washing- 
ton, the founder, and of Lincoln, the preserver, pass 
our institutions in all their beneficent grandeur and 
beauty to those who come after us. 



I40 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 



o 



IX. 

RATION AT THE REUNION OF THE ARMY OF 

THE Potomac at Saratoga, Evening of June 
22, 1887. 



Soldiers of the Army of the Potomac : 

Last summer I stood upon the White Hill at Prague, 
in Bohemia, where the Thirty Years' War began and 
ended. There is no more suggestive spot in Europe. 
It recalled a picture of the horrors and desolation of war 
unequaled in history. Across the vision moved the 
majestic figures of Gustavus Adolphus and Wallenstein, 
of Turenne, and Tilly, and Cardinal Richelieu. The con- 
test began when the Continent was dominated by the 
German Empire, and ended with the magnificent crea- 
tion of Charles the Fifth broken into numberless petty 
principalities. Religious zeal supported the combat- 
ants on both sides. The results were gains in tolera- 
tion of creeds, but the losses in power and prestige and 
in devastated cities and countries were incalculable. I 
was struck with the parallel it offered with our Civil 
War. The separation of the German people into little 
states, each with its court, its army, and its jealousies, 
made Germany the prey of conquerors for two hundred 
years. Liberty was crushed, and the public burdens 
were intolerable. Each new invader found allies among 



dllAUNCEY M. DEPEVV. i4t 

the contending kingdoms and duchies, and internal dis- 
sensions made national unity and strength impossible. 
It was not until after two centuries of suffering and 
humiliation that the genius of Bismarck consolidated 
the German people into an Empire. Instantly they 
assumed their proper place, and became the strongest 
and most hopeful of European powers. 

The War of the Rebellion began properly with the 
battle of Bull Run ; it ended within a short distance, at 
Appomattox. Along seven thousand miles of country 
battles were fought and armies maneuvered, but the 
transcendent conflicts were always in Virginia. The 
Army of the Potomac and the army of Lee were the 
main combatants, for whom other armies, in their own 
gallant and brilliant way, were creating diversions, fight- 
ing glorious battles, and drawing off the strength of the 
adversary. Like the contest of the seventeenth centu- 
ry, ours was both a civil and religious war. Three gen- 
erations of the people of eleven States had been taught 
by the ablest and most logical statesmen of their time 
that, as a matter of the highest political economy, the 
laborer should be enslaved. No other doctrine was 
permitted to reach the masses, and they became unan- 
imous in this belief. The Church threw around this 
opinion its sacred benediction, and doctors of divinity 
and ambitious politicians vied with each other in find- 
ing excuses for slavery, the one by distorted interpreta- 
tions of the Scriptures, and the other by forced render- 
ings of the Constitution. In the North preacher and 
publicist inveighed against it as the most frightful 
curse to the State and a crime against God. But the 
country came out of the conflict, not like the old Ger- 



142 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

man Empire from the Thirty Years' War, a confedera- 
tion of independent and warring states, but a mighty na- 
tion. We beHeved from the start in unity and nation- 
ahty, and upon them staked our all. We escaped that 
terrible experience of two hundred years by which Ger- 
many learned her lesson, and the American Bismarck 
was the American people. 

In the Army of the Potomac the State of New York 
has the deepest and most tender interest. This com- 
monwealth contributed more men to its ranks than they 
ever mustered at any one time. The grand total of the 
mighty host enlisted from this State under its banners 
was four hundred and eighty-eight thousand, and from 
every one of your battle-fields the cords of grief are 
stretched to all the cities, villages, and hamlets within 
our borders. It is, therefore, eminently fit that you 
should frequently honor us with your reunions, and pre- 
eminently appropriate that a commemoration should be 
had upon this spot. The battle of Saratoga is one of 
the landmarks of liberty. A great critic has placed it 
among the most important of the fifteen decisive con- 
flicts of history. The patriot army was in desperate 
straits, and the Continental treasury bankrupt and with- 
out credit. The British Cabinet had ordered that Bur- 
goyne should march down from the north to meet Sir 
Henry Clinton coming up the Hudson, and the young 
confederacy thus cut in twain could be easily con- 
quered. Washington was as thoroughly alive to the 
perils of the situation as the English generals were to 
its possibilities. The hopes and fears of the young Re- 
public were concentrated on the army facing Burgoyne 
at Saratoga. The battle closed, not only with the de- 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEIV. 143 

feat, but in the capture, of the entire British army, with 
all its armament and stores. The victory breathed the 
breath of life into American credit, and opened the 
sources of national revenue. It inspired the wavering 
and gave strength to the weak. It furnished the means 
to that hero and patriot of two continents, the Marquis 
de Lafayette, by which he brought about the French 
alliance. "Now is the time and here is the place for 

- every enemy of England to strike a mortal blow," said 
old Frederick the Great, of Prussia, when he heard of 

# Saratoga, and the governments of the world received 
the United States of America into the family of na- 
tions. 

But it is not to celebrate the victories and the vir- 
tues of the heroes of the Revolution that we are met 
here to-day. It is for old soldiers once more to touch 
elbows, for the cordial communion of comrades, for the 
revival of sacred reminiscences, and the broader purpose 
of keeping coming generations informed for what you 
fought and what you won. Vapid sentimentalists and 
timid souls deprecate these annual reunions, fearing 
they may arouse old strifes and sectional animosities; 
but a war in which five hundred thousand men were 
killed and two millions were wounded ; in which States 
were devastated and money spent equal to twice Eng- 
land's gigantic debt ; has a meaning, a lesson, and re- 
sults which are to the people of this Republic a liberal 
education, and the highest chairs in this university 
belong to you. 

We cheerfully admit that the Confederate equally 
with the Federal soldier believed he was ficrhtine for the 
right, and maintained his faith with a valor which fully 



144 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

sustained the reputation of Americans for courage and 
constancy ; and yet, one side or the other was wrong. 
It was slavery and disunion, or freedom and union, and 
one must not only yield, but die. The God of Battles 
decided for Liberty and Nationality, and no surviving 
soldier who fought in either army to-day doubts the 
righteousness of that verdict. The best and bravest 
thinkers of the South gladly proclaim that the superb 
development which has been the outgrowth of their 
defeat is worth all its losses, its sacrifices, its humilia- 
tions. As torrents of living waters flowed from the!* 
rock smitten by Moses in the desert, so from the touch 
of liberty has come an industrial revolution full of pros- 
perity and promise. The wastes and wildernesses of 
feudal baronies are inviting emigration to a new agri- 
culture and harvests of wealth, and the hills and moun- 
tains are yielding their treasuries to the founding and 
building of new Birminghams and Shefifields. The 
marvelous recuperation of the whole country in the 
past twenty years, and our gigantic strides in material 
progress, have almost obliterated from memory the fact 
that these results are solely due to the victories won by 
the armies of the Union. Let the youth of all sections 
grow up from generation to generation taught the 
lesson and imbued with the sentiment that this Repub- 
lic is not a confederacy of independent States, but a 
nation, with the right and power to use the last dollar 
and enlist the last man to maintain the authority of the 
Constitution and the supremacy of the flag. Whoever 
is offended by this is not a loyal citizen and should 
"reconstruct" or emigrate. Englishmen fought against 
Englishmen in the Revolutionary War, and now, to the 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. i4S 

modern and enlightened Briton, the Fourth of July is 
as triumphant a day as it is for us. It won for us inde- 
pendence, and for him larger liberties and better gov- 
ernment. I say it reverently, the converted sinner 
kneels at the altar and confesses before God and the 
world the error of his ways, or the heresy of his opin- 
ions, and when forgiven and absolved, instead of being 
offended at the repeated celebrations of the event, he 
glories in the victory, and calls upon comrades and com- 
panions to share his happiness. The results of the Civil 
War were embodied in the Constitution and embedded 
in the laws of the land, and loyal minds and loyal 
hearts, no matter on which side they fought, hold that 
the observance and enforcement of such laws in letter 
and in spirit are the tests of true citizenship and honest 
patriotism. 

We are surfeited in these times with careful calcu- 
lations and rigid estimates of the value of the services 
of the men who fought this war. In popular discus- 
sions it is widely taught that "pensioner" is a term of 
reproach instead of honorable recognition of the coun- 
try's gratitude. I remember, when a boy, that the 
most distinguished guests at all patriotic celebrations 
were the venerable men whose names were borne on 
the pension-roll of the army. It was a decoration, and 
carried with it the distinction of the medal and ribbon 
of the Legion of Honor. Fraud upon the pension fund 
is a capital crime and merits the severest punishment, 
but the principles upon which it is founded, and the 
purity with which it is administered, reflect credit alike 
upon the giver and the recipients. The men who at a 
compensation of thirteen dollars a month left behind 



146 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

them prospects for promotion in their professions, 
wealth in their business, and competence from their in- 
dustries, and for four years marched under blazing suns, 
slept upon the ground, breathed the miasma of the 
swamps, were racked with the fevers of the jungle, and 
amidst shot and shell and saber-thrust kept their colors 
aloft and bore them to the Capital in triumph, secured 
for the sixty millions of people of this Republic, and 
their descendants, those unequaled civil and religious 
rights and business opportunities which make this land 
the one country in the world where people of all nation- 
alities are seeking homes, and from which no man ever 
voluntarily emigrated. In i860 the developed and 
assessable property of the United States was valued at 
sixteen thousand millions of dollars. One-half of this 
enormous sum was destroyed by the Civil War, and yet 
so prodigious has been the growth of wealth under the 
conditions created by the national victory and the set- 
tlements of reconstruction, that in this month of June, 
1887, the estimate surpasses the imperial figure of sixty 
thousand millions of dollars, and the growth is at the 
rate of nearly seven millions a day. Our wealth ap- 
proximates one-half of that of all Europe, and it is an 
easy task for the statistician to aggregate civilized 
governments with populations of hundreds of millions 
of people who are paupers in the scale of comparisons. 
While in Europe with the increase of population there 
has been a decrease, since the surrender of Appomat- 
tox, in the amount for each individual, here during 
the same period the increase for every inhabitant has 
been fifty per cent. If it be true that the transmitti- 
ble property of the world accumulated during the last 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. I47 

twenty-five years equals all the gains from the birth of 
Christ to the beginning of the present century, then 
much of it has been made by this favored nation, which 
for sixteen hundred years had no existence, and was 
not an appreciable factor in the divisible property of the 
earth at the close of the Christian calculation. These 
unparalleled results can be protected and continued 
only by the spirit represented by your sacrifices and 
inspiring your victories — the spirit of patriotism. This 
is a republic, and neither Mammon nor Anarchy shall 
be king. The American asks only for a fair field and 
an equal chance. He believes that every man is en- 
titled for himself and his children to the full enjoyment 
of all he honestly earns ; but he will seek and find 
the means for eradicating conditions which hopelessly 
handicap him from the start. In this contest he does 
not want the assistance of the Red Flag, and he regards 
with equal hostility those who march under that banner 
and those who furnish argument and excuse for its ex- 
istence. The men who in 1880 "cornered" our wheat 
product, and so artificially raised the price all over the 
world that governments and peoples pushed railroads 
through Indian plains to the Himalayas, across Russian 
steppes to the Arctic zone, and over Australian deserts 
to fertile valleys, in search of food, created for us com- 
petitions which lost us the foreign markets and partial- 
ly paralyzed our agricultural prosperity. They were 
public enemies. In good times and easy credit a small 
margin represents millions of capital, and reckless specu- 
lators control first one and then another of the necessa- 
ries of life, raising the cost of living beyond the profits 
of production, throwing thousands of industrious men 



148 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

out of employment, and thwarting and ruining legiti- 
mate trades and business capital. They exasperate the 
victims and incite combinations and dangers which 
threaten the whole property of the country, the peace 
of communities, and the lives of millions of people. If 
public sentiment cannot reach these evils, our Constitu- 
tions are elastic enough, our Legislatures wise enough, 
and our Courts strong enough, to eradicate them by 
lawful means. Traffic in the food of the people must 
be free. The corporation is the creature of the State, 
its powers limited by the conditions of its existence, its 
methods subject to public supervision, and its life 
dependent upon its creator. It is the only medium 
through which many of the great enterprises of our 
civilization can be carried on. But the sun of publicity 
can send no ray into the labyrinths of those gigantic 
combinations which are created by neither law nor cus- 
tom nor necessity, and whose mysterious movements 
are at once the peril and the puzzle of the investor, and 
the destructive traps for enterprise and ambition. 

Thirty years ago Macaulay wrote a letter to an emi- 
nent citizen of this State which carries to the reader 
the shock of an electric battery. In it he declares that 
our institutions are not strong enough to stand the 
strain of crowded populations and social distress, and 
that our public lands furnish the only escape from anar- 
chy. With the opening of the next century, thirteen 
years hence, they will all be occupied, and at the first in- 
dustrial disturbance which throws large masses of men 
out of employment we must meet the prediction of the 
famous historian. If Macaulay had witnessed the sub- 
lime response of the people to President Lincoln's call 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. 149 

for troops to suppress rebellion and save the Union, it 
would have cleared his vision and modified his judg- 
ment. Nevertheless, the exhaustion of the public do- 
main and the disappearance forever of the unbought 
homestead, present part of Macaulay's problem. The 
ranks of anarchy and riot number no Americans. The 
leaders boldly proclaim that they come here, not to en- 
joy the blessings of our liberty and to sustain our insti- 
tutions, but to destroy our Government and dethrone 
our laws, to cut our throats and divide our property. 
Dissatisfied labor furnishes the opportunity to preach 
their doctrines and mobs to try their tactics. Their 
recruiting officers are active in every city in Europe, 
and for once despotic governments give them accord 
and assistance, in securing and shipping to America the 
most dangerous elements of their populations. The 
emigrants arriving this year will outnumber the peo- 
ple of several States, and of every city in the coun- 
try but three, and if some mighty power should in- 
stantly depopulate Maine or Connecticut or Nebraska, 
or Buffalo, Cleveland, Detroit, and New Haven com- 
bined, with their culture, refinement, and varied pro- 
fessional, mechanical, and industrial excellence and en- 
lightened government, and suddenly substitute these 
people, we could quickly estimate the character and 
value of this contribution to our institutions and wealth. 
The emigrants of the past have been of incalculable 
benefit to a country which needed settlers for its lands, 
and skilled and unskilled labor for its towns, and among 
them have been men who have filled and adorned the 
highest positions of power and trust. The officers of 
the Government report that there is a falHng-off of over 



150 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

seventy per cent, of farmers, mechanics, and trained 
workers, and their places are occupied by elements 
which must drift into and demorahze labor centers al- 
ready overstocked and congested, or fill the highways 
and poorhouses. We do not wish to prohibit emigra- 
tion, but our laws should be rigidly revised so that we 
may at least have some voice in the selection of our 
guests. We cannot afford to become the dumping- 
ground of the world for its vicious or ignorant or worth- 
less or diseased. We will welcome, as always, all pa- 
triots fleeing from oppression, all who will contribute 
to the strength of our Government and the development 
of our resources, and we will freely grant to all who be- 
come citizens equal rights and privileges under the laws 
and in making them, with the soldiers who saved the 
Republic, but no more. There is room in this country 
for only one flag, and "Old Glory" must head the pro- 
cession or it cannot march. 

A nation of the power and position of the United 
States should have a navy strong enough to protect its 
coasts and harbors, to maintain its honor and enforce 
respect for its flag, and an army worthy of the name. 
Wars have not ceased. With our reviving commerce 
and growing interests all over the world, we may at any 
time be embroiled in a conflict with some European or 
South American government. That Turkey or Chili 
could sweep our navy from the seas in a month ; that 
there is no gun or armament in any of our ports which 
could prevent an ironclad from entering the harbor and 
destroying our chief cities or levying hundreds of mil- 
lions of tribute ; is not gratifying to our sense, our se- 
curity, or our pride. That we would be buffeted and 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEVV. 151 

humiliated for two years before we would be able to 
protect ourselves or retaliate, illustrates the superlative 
idiocy of our blind confidence in our resources. The 
governments of Europe, armed to the teeth, are con- 
fronting each other, and an accident or a death may 
precipitate the most gigantic conflict of modern times; 
but they will not always be thus engaged. An army 
of fifty thousand men is none too large to man our forts 
and frontiers, and form the nucleus and the school for 
our volunteers. For while the citizen soldiers will al- 
ways be our reliance in war or rebellion, it takes many 
months to arm, equip, and drill them for effective ser- 
vice. 

We are in the enjoyment of profound domestic tran- 
quillity, but the safety of every man in his home, his 
family, his children, and his property is only in the su- 
premacy of the laws. Among sixty millions of people, 
and soon to be a hundred millions, spread over a conti- 
nent, there is liable to arise at any time insurrection or 
riots from economic or political or religious or social 
causes beyond the power of local or state authorities to 
meet. There has been a Mormon rebellion; others of 
like character are possible. A temperance murder may 
provoke that most frightful form of tyranny, mob rule. 
Had the police been routed on the night of the anarch- 
ists' assault at Chicago, it would have taken an army to 
save the unprotected city from burning and pillage and 
the unutterable horrors of the sack. A less peace-lov- 
ing or self-poised man than Samuel J. Tilden would 
have stirred political passions, inflamed to the fighting 
point, into bloody revolt. The demagogue who pre- 
tends to fear that the liberties of sixty millions of 



152 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

people may be endangered by an army of fifty or a 
hundred thousand men, finds instead of the creduHty 
which accepts his opinions, only contempt for himself. 
The American Caesar is an airy phantasm of a diseased 
imagination. In all ordinary, and most of the extra- 
ordinary, cases of local trouble, the police and the sheriff 
are equal to the emergency, but it was found in the 
riots of 1877, when States were paralyzed and their offi- 
cers helpless, that in the popular mind the supreme 
sovereignty of the American people was represented by 
the uniform of the regular army, and through it sixty 
millions of citizens demanded the cessation of hostili- 
ties, the restoration of law and order, and the vindica- 
tion of rights by the courts. It is the glory of the army 
and the pride of the nation, that since the formation of 
the Government no regiment or company of United 
States soldiers has ever joined the enemy, sympathized 
with insurrection, or sided with rebellion. That an 
efificient, thoroughly drilled, and equipped body of citi- 
zen soldiers should exist in every State — of which no 
better example exists than the National Guard of New 
York — is too self-evident for discussion ; it keeps alive 
the martial spirit of patriotism and principle of volun- 
tary service. But I have no fears of the fulfillment of 
Macaulay's direful forebodings. I have unlimited faith 
in the absorbent properties of American communities, 
and the solvent powers of American liberty. Let us 
take care of the Mosts, the Spies, and the Schwabs; 
and the press, the platform, the school, the church, and 
the English language, will make honest citizens of their 
followers and their descendants. Every man who leads 
a temperate and industrious life, and organizes himself 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. 153 

into an anti-poverty society of one, has secured his in- 
dependence and individual prosperity, and become a 
champion of order and a bulwark of law. 

So long as the veterans of the Civil War can carry 
muskets and rally at command, the nation has a most 
effective army. But age, disease, and death are fast 
thinning their ranks. Their active service will soon be 
only glorious memories for the inspiration of others. 
Their story will be the recruiting sergeant of coming 
generations. Each of the great armies had its distin- 
guishing merit, but in the achievements and in the rec- 
ords of the Western forces, following the precedent of 
previous wars, are largely represented the genius and 
personality of great commanders. To the Army of the 
Potomac belongs the unique distinction of being its 
own hero. It fought more battles and lost more in 
killed and wounded than all the others ; it shed its blood 
like water to teach incompetent officers the art of war, 
and political tacticians the folly of their plans; but it 
was always the same invincible and undismayed Army 
of the Potomac. Loyal ever to its mission and to dis- 
cipline, the only sound it gave in protest of the murder- 
ous folly of cabinets and generals was the crackling of 
the bones as cannon-balls ploughed through its deci- 
mated ranks. 

The verdict of history is already made up as to the 
value of its services, its sacrifices, and its victories, but 
perhaps not yet upon its commanders. All of them 
were brave soldiers, all of them were unequaled at the 
head of a division or a corps; but to make the combi- 
nations to overcome the Titanic forces of the unprece- 
dented obstacles presented by nature, a hostile popu- 



154 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

lation, and a foe of equal power and prowess on the 
defensive line, was not their talent. From intermediate 
discussions we rise to the contemplation of two grand 
facts, standing like monuments at the beginning and 
close of its career: that it owed its existence to the 
masterly organizing abilities of McClellan, and ended 
the war under the superb generalship of Grant. As we 
recall the memory of the dead, the spirits of all the war- 
rior heroes of the past come trooping before us. There 
are Alexander and Caesar, Gustavus and the great Fred- 
erick, Napoleon and his marshals, Wellington and his 
generals, Washington and his compatriots; and they 
have enrolled in their company and encircled with their 
praise, Hancock and Hooker, Sumner and Sedgwick, 
Meade and Warren, Burnside and Reynolds, Kearny, 
Wadsworth, Custer, and Kilpatrick. 

A good soldier does full honor to his adversary. Also 
Americans, though on the wrong side, no more formida- 
ble force of equal numbers ever marched or fought than 
the Army of Northern Virginia; and it had the rare 
fortune of being always under the command of one of 
the most creative and accomplished military minds of 
his time — General Lee, To conquer and capture such 
an army and captain, the Army of the Potomac must 
overcome what the greatest of tacticians has said was 
invincible : an armed enemy in his own country, with 
the whole population venomously hostile, acting as 
spies, furnishing information, removing supplies, pre- 
paring ambuscades, and misleading the invader; and it 
did accomplish this military miracle. It was hard and 
trying to be marched and countermarched for naught ; 
to be separated and paralyzed at the moment when a 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEtV. 155 

supieme effort meant victory; to be hurled against im- 
passable defenses, and then waste months in repairing 
the mistake ; but in God's mysterious providence it was 
the only means by which the end of the war should be 
a final settlement. Had the conflict closed by the cap- 
ture of Richmond during the first or second, or even 
the third year it would have left an armed, defiant, and 
unconverted adversary, utilizing peace as a truce in 
which to recuperate for another blow, when sure of 
larger sympathy and support in the North. It required 
complete and utter exhaustion, and the humiliation of 
total and hopeless defeat, that, in absolute despair of 
revenge, reflection might calmly reason through the 
errors of the lost cause to the glowing realization that 
defeat was victory, that poverty would be the source 
of undreamed wealth, and that the striking of the chains 
from the limbs of the slave had unshackled the master. 
It was the answer to the i\postle's cry, "Oh, wretched 
man that I am, who shall deliver me from the body of 
this death !" And the disenthralled rebel in his rags 
began the life of a prosperous patriot. 

The Army of the Potomac was composed of think- 
ing bayonets. Behind each musket was a man who 
knew for what he was fighting, and intended when the 
war was over to return home and take up the peaceful 
implements of his trade or profession where he had 
dropped them. He understood the plan of campaign, 
and with unerring and terrible accuracy sized up his 
commander. The one soldier in whom he never lost 
confidence was himself. This army operated so near 
the Capitol, that congressmen and newspapers directed 
its movements, changed its officers, and criticised its 



156 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

failures to conquer upon lines blue-penciled on Washing- 
ton maps. It suffered for four years under unparalleled 
abuse, and was encouraged by little praise, but never 
murmured. It saw all its corps and division comman- 
ders sign a petition to the President to remove its Gen- 
eral, and then despairingly but heroically marched to 
certain disaster at his order. It saw its General de- 
mand the resignation or court-martial of its corps and 
division officers, and yet, undemoralized and undis- 
mayed, it charged under his successor in a chaos of con- 
flicting commands. 

"On to Richmond !" came the unthinking cry from 
every city, village, and cross-roads in the North; "On 
to Richmond !" shouted grave senators and impetuous 
congressmen ; "On to Richmond !" ordered the Cabinet, 
no longer able to resist the popular demand, and the 
raw and untrained recruits were hurled from their un- 
formed organizations and driven back to Washington. 
Then, with discipline and drill, out of chaos came order; 
the self-asserting volunteer had become an obedient 
soldier, the mass had been molded into a complex and 
magnificent machine, and it was the "Army of the Po- 
tomac." Overcoming untold difficulties, fighting with 
superb courage, it comes in sight of the spires of Rich- 
mond, and then, unable to succeed, because McDowell 
and his corps of thirty-four thousand are held back, it 
renews each morning and carries on ever}' night in re- 
treat the seven days' battle for existence, and, brought 
to bay at Malvern Hill, asserts its undaunted spirit in 
hard-won victor>\ It follows Pope, and marches, and 
falls back, pursues enemies who are not before it, and 
finds foes for which it is unprepared, and fights, and is 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. ^^1 

beaten, under orders so contradictory and counsels so 
divided, that an army of European veterans would have 
disbanded. Immediately it recognizes a general in 
whom it has confidence, the stragglers come from the 
bush, and the wounded from the hospitals; regiments, 
brigades, divisions, and corps reform, and at Antietam 
it is invincible and irresistible. Every man in the ranks 
knows that the fortified heights of Fredericksburg are 
impregnable; that the forlorn-hope charges not into 
the imminent deadly breach, but into a death-trap, and 
yet, with unfaltering step, this grand army salutes its 
blind commander, and marches to the slaughter. 

Theirs not to reason why, 
Theirs not to make reply, 
Theirs but to do and die. 

Every private was aware of the follies of the Rappa- 
hannock campaign. He knew that the opportunity to 
inflict an irreparable blow upon the army of Lee had been 
trifled away, and that after reckless delays to make the 
movement, which at first would have been a surprise, 
conceived by the very genius of war, was then mere 
midsummer madness; and yet this incomparable army, 
floundering through swamps, lost in almost impenetra- 
ble forests, outflanked, outmaneuvered, outgeneraled, 
decimated, no sooner felt the firm hand of Meade than 
they destroyed the offensive and aggressive power of the 
Confederacy in the three days' fighting at Gettysburg. 

At last this immortal army of Cromwellian descent, 
of Viking ancestry, and the blood of Brian Boru, had 
at its head a great captain who had never lost a battle, 
and whom President Lincoln had freed from political 
meddling and the interference of the civil authorities. 



158 ORATIOA'S AND SPEECHES OF 

Every morning for thirty days came the orders to storm 
the works in front, and every evening for thirty nights 
the survivors moved to the command, "By the left 
flank, forward, march" ; and at the end of that fateful 
month, with sixty thousand comrades dead or wounded 
in the Wilderness, the Army of the Potomac once more, 
after four years, saw the spires of Richmond. Inflexi- 
ble of purpose, insensible to suffering, inured to fatigue, 
and reckless of danger, it rained blow on blow upon its 
heroic but staggering foe, and the world gained a new 
and better and freer and more enduring Republic than 
it had ever known, in the surrender at Appomattox. 

When Lincoln and Grant and Sherman, firmly hold- 
ing behind them the vengeful passions of the Civil War, 
put out their victorious arms to the South and said, 
"We are brethren," this generous and patriotic army 
joined in the glad acclaim and welcome with their fer- 
vent "Amen." Twenty-two years have come and gone 
since you marched down Pennsylvania Avenue past the 
people's representatives, to whom you and your Wes- 
tern comrades there committed the Government you 
had saved and the liberties you had redeemed ; past 
Americans from whose citizenship you had wiped with 
your blood the only stain, and made it the proudest of 
earthly titles. Call the roll. The names reverberate 
from earth to Heaven. "All present or accounted for." 
Here the living answer for the dead ; there the spirits 
of the dead answer for the living. As God musters 
them out on earth. He enrolls them above; and as the 
Republic marches down the ages, accumukiting power 
and splendor with each succeeding century, the van 
will be led by the Army of the Potomac. 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. 159 



s 



X. 



PEECH AT THE BANQUET GIVEN ON MARCH 16, 

1886, BY THE Members. OF the Union League 
Club of 1863 and 1864, to Commemorate the 
Departure for the Seat of War of the 
Twentieth Regiment of United States Col- 
ored Troops, Raised by the Club. 



It is a fortunate thing that in the rush and hurry of 
our metropolitan Hfe, celebrations Hke this occur. It 
is one of the great safety-valves in the high pressure of 
business and care, that the American people can seize 
upon and utilize every opportunity to meet about the 
festive board. Happily for our health, spirits and 
longevity, for our elevation above drudgery, our fresh 
and continuing interest in the intellectual life of the 
world, and our possibilities for agreeable companion- 
ship, the average New Yorker lets slip no occasion 
which will justify putting his legs under the mahogany 
and himself outside a good dinner. We live in a vor- 
tex of business, great undertakings, stocks, bonds, and 
money-making. In the vestibule of the church, the se- 
clusion of the club, the privacy of our homes, the midst 
of our festivities, comes the shadow of the shop, and 
the man whose talk is all of the street. We have no 
opportunities for plain living and high thinking, for elo- 



l6o ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

quence and lofty debate. The only two occasions 
which call forth genuine metropolitan enthusiasm and 
suggest the possibilities of an intellectual life are, when 
at their annual banquets the sons of New England loud- 
ly proclaim that all there is of liberty, progress, and 
culture in this country has come from the Puritans and 
their descendants ; or the disciples of St. Patrick argue in 
ardent speech that their conspicuous talent for govern- 
ment entitles them to hold and administer all the offices. 

The significance of this celebration lies in the fact 
that it is one of the few which recall an event worth 
commemorating. We who were upon the stage of ac- 
tion during the Civil War recall as if it were but yester- 
day the scenes which have been recited here with such 
graphic and realistic power. It occurs to only one 
generation in a thousand years to witness the events 
and experience the emotions of the times which this 
occasion brings in review. I remember as if it had 
happened this morning, the marching of that colored 
regiment down Broadway. 

While in memory these scenes of a quarter of a 
century ago seem so near, a look about this table dis- 
pels the illusion. I recall most of you as you appeared 
during that famous march down Broadway. Bliss * 
was then known as the white-headed boy, Acton's f 
crown of snow was a glossy black, Schultz % ^vas lithe 
and active as a young race-horse; and it is a trib- 
ute to the healthfulness of courageous patriotism and 
public spirit, that all of you are here with unimpaired 
mental, moral, and physical vigor. 



* Col. George Bliss, t Thomas Acton. % Jackson S. Schultz. 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. l6l 

It is a rare privilege to have been a participant in the 
events of the Civil War. It is not once in a hundred 
years that the opportunity comes when the tremendous 
issues involved spiritualize everybody, when enthusiasm 
mounts to ecstasy, and standing, as it were, upon the 
boundary of the finite and the infinite, we grasp them 
both. For a man to have gone through such a struggle 
and felt its emotions, is to have lived the lives of count- 
less generations. Those people whose lot is cast in 
ordinary times, who meet only the usual accidents and 
changes in public affairs, and drift along on smooth cur- 
rents of opinion and discussion, know nothing of this 
experience. It is only in those great crises in the fates 
of governments and peoples, which involve the accumu- 
lations of the past and the hopes of the future, when 
the world waits in hushed expectancy the result, that a 
man in the concentrated intensity of his feelings be- 
comes God-like. 

Every one of us who passes through such a baptism 
would not exchange it for a hundred peaceful and 
uneventful years. I stood upon a balcony when the 
Seventh marched down Broadway on their way to res- 
cue the Capitol. About me were men from all parts of 
the State who had come down to the city to witness 
their departure. Many of them were rough and coarse, 
possessing little refinement, but strong in all the arts of 
politics and trade ; and yet they fell on each other, and 
in their sobs and tears were transformed and ennobled. 
As the regiment marched by, and amid the salutes I 
saw the pallid faces of fathers, brothers, and friends, the 
waving handkerchief, and then the drooping forms of 
mother, wife, sweetheart, sister; before me seemed the 



l62 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

picture of our Country, with all its achievements and 
possibilities for liberty and humanity, in deadly peril, 
and may be to be saved by these flashing guns. And 
then came the shock — this is war; these young men 
may never return, the land is to be filled with sorrow, 
with deserted homesteads, mourning firesides, broken 
hearts, and what will be the issue? Disunion? never; 
we all felt and knew from that hour that the nation was 
aroused and the Republic would be saved. I believe 
the march of the Seventh Regiment down Broadway, 
which was witnessed in panoramic description by the 
whole Country, thrilled a sordid and money-getting 
people to an enthusiasm which developed the noblest 
patriotism, and won for liberty its most enduring tri- 
umjih. 

Well, as we are taking out of memory's store-house 
to-night pictures of every kind, let us lay down for the 
moment the tragedies, and take up this sketch which 
outlines the other side. I remember while sitting in 
my ofifice one morning in that most beautiful and pictur- 
esque spot on earth, the village of Peekskill, an order 
came from the Governor for the i8th Regiment of 
Westchester militia (of which I was an of^cer) to move 
immediately to the front and head off General Lee's 
army returning from the invasion of Pennsylvania. 
'1 he regiment, as a whole, had never met, but it was 
equal to the emergency. Every member of it dropped 
his plow or locked his office, and the next day we were 
marching down Broadway. The Union League did not 
notice us. the populace did not enthuse, and the Gov- 
ernment put us on cattle-cars and shipped us to Balti- 
more. When we formed in line of battle I found that 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. 1 63 

the front of the regiment was much safer than the rear. 
But the reputation of a martial host often makes 
their presence as potent as their steel. The fame of 
the prowess and value of the Westchester yeomanry 
had preceded them. The very night we arrived in 
Baltimore for the purpose of preventing General Lee 
from reaching Virginia, he fled from Gettysburg. I 
found afterwards, in looking over the Confederate rec- 
ords in Washington, that into the midst of the Rebel 
council of war, upon a horse flecked with foam, dashed 
a breathless messenger, bearing from the Rebels in 
Baltimore this significant message, "The i8th Westches- 
ter has arrived." The next day the broken ranks of 
Lee's invading host were flying down the valley of the 
Shenandoah, and the North was saved. I tell this story 
and pay this tribute to a corps whose deeds might not 
otherwise be recorded, because your chairman, Col. 
Cannon, announced that in to-night's reminiscences 
many things never heard of before would be told for 
the instruction and delight of future generations. 

My friend, Col. Cannon, asks me to speak of and for 
the women in the war. It is historically true that if it 
had not been for the women of the South, the war 
would have closed two years before it did. When the 
men saw the inevitable and were ready to submit, their 
mothers, wives, and sweethearts kept them to the front, 
and were ready to perish with them in the last ditch. 
On the other hand, if it had not been for the women of 
the North, the war would have ended in a disgraceful 
compromise. When a Confederate victory was hailed 
with applause by the vast crowd of Rebel sympathizers 
in New York City and elsewhere, and the discourage- 



1 64 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

ments of defeat were intensified by internal divisions in 
our own community, the weak-hearted and the waver- 
ing joined in the call for peace at any price — peace 
which would have restored the Union with the seeds of 
dissolution planted in its structure. 

But the women who were bereaved and the women 
whose loved ones were still in the field, cried with one 
voice, "Union with liberty and the principles of its per- 
petuity, or death with honor." To the women in the 
war belongs the higher and the purer glory. The volun- 
teer was inspired by the trumpet's blare, the cannon's 
roar, the shouts of marching thousands, and the wild 
intoxication of gunpowder and fighting. Honor, im- 
mortality, every emotion and incentive which fires the 
blood, and in all ages has led the forlorn hope, carried 
the deadly breach, and made the heroes of the world, 
were with him and behind him. But for the women 
there were none of these conditions. In loneliness, in sor- 
row, often in want, it was their lot to suffer and endure. 
No opportunity for them to be placed upon the roll of 
honor or to win immortal fame. Patriotic women sub- 
mitted to the hardships of camp and field ; they nursed 
in the hospitals and lived in chambers of horrors for 
three years. For what? For glory or a decoration? 
Oh no ! But with love which was angelic, piety which 
was .saintlike, and an abnegation of self and devotion 
to duty unparalleled, they labored to alleviate suffering, 
encourage the despairing, help the wounded hero back 
to health, or, if need be, soothe and smooth his passage 
to the grave. Many an unknown private soldier, recall- 
ing in the last supreme moment his childhood and home, 
went to his reward blessed with a touch so sympathetic 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. 1 65 

and a kiss so pure, that his own mother seemed to ten- 
derly commit his spirit to his Maker, Tens of thous- 
ands of sick and wounded soldiers lived to join their 
families and enjoy the gratitude of their countrymen 
solely through what was done for them by the women, 
through sanitary commissions, contribution of necessa- 
ries and luxuries, and personal attendance and care. 
All hail to the mothers, sisters, wives, and sweethearts 
of the war. Their courage and constancy were the fac- 
tors in the salvation of the Republic. 

The three hundred founders of this Club who braved 
social ostracism and contempt, by marching as an escort 
for the first colored regiment down Broadway, are 
worthy of commemoration and honor; but the ladies 
who gave the regiment its flag must share in this glory. 
I am sure that proud as my friend Mr. Astor, who sat 
beside me, has a right to be, that he was one of the 
three hundred, there is a source of profounder gratifi- 
cation in the fact that Mrs. Astor was Chairman of the 
Ladies' Committee which presented the flag. The po- 
tent influence of the women of position and power in 
our New York world stamped out prejudice, turned his- 
ses into applause, exalted the humble and despised to 
places of honor, and in giving the black man not only 
the right but the invitation to fight for his liberty, 
created the force which emancipated the slaves and 
saved the Union. 



1 66 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 



S 



XI. 



i'eech at the dinner to celebrate the 
Anniversary of the Birth of Gen. Grant, 
AT Delmonico's, April 27, 1888. 



I do not propose, as has been announced, to deliver 
a formal oration upon General Grant, but, as one of the 
many gentlemen who are to speak here to-night, to ex- 
press the judgment of a busy man of affairs upon his 
character and career. We are not yet far enough from 
this striking personality to read accurately the verdict 
of posterity, and we are so near that we still feel the 
force of the mighty passions in the midst of which he 
moved and lived. The hundred years of our national 
existence are crowded with an unusual number of men 
eminent in arms and in statesmanship ; but of all the 
illustrious list one only has his birthday a legal holi- 
day — George Washington. Of the heroes and patriots 
who filled the niches in our temple of fame for the first 
century, the birthdays of only two of them are of such 
significance that they receive wide celebrations — Lin- 
coln and Grant. When the historian of the future calm- 
ly and impartially writes the story of this momentous 
period, these two names will be inseparably linked to- 
gether. The President supplemented the General, and 
the General the President, and without them the great 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. 167 

battle of human rights and American unity might have 
been lost. 

Reticent as to his plans, secretive as to his move- 
ments, repelling inquiry and disdaining criticism, Gener- 
al Grant invited the deepest hostility from the country 
at large. Three years of war, which had carried grief to 
every household, and in which the failures had been 
greater than the successes, had made the people dis- 
pirited, impatient, and irritable. The conditions were 
such that the demand for the removal of Grant many 
times would have been irresistible, and the call for re- 
cruits to fill his depleted ranks unanswered, except for 
the peculiar hold the President had upon the country. 

Lincoln was not an accidental or experimental Presi- 
dent. As a member of Congress he became familiar 
with the details of government, and in the debate with 
Douglas had demonstrated a familiarity with the ques- 
tions before the people, and a genius for their solution, 
unequaled among his contemporaries. No one of the 
statesmen of the time, who might possibly have been 
President, could have held the country up to the high- 
water mark of the continuous struggle of hope against 
defeat, of fighting not only against a solid enemy, but 
an almost equal division in his own camps. His hum- 
ble origin, his homely ways, his quaint humor, his con- 
stant touch and sympathy with the people, inspired the 
confidence which enabled him to command and wield 
all the forces of the Republic. He alone could stand 
between the demand for Grant's removal, the criticism 
upon his plans, the fierce outcries against his losses, 
and satisfy the country of the infallibility of his own 
trust in the ultimate success of the command. 



l6S ORATIOjVS and SPEECHES OF 

On the other hand, the aspiration of Lincoln for the 
defeat of the rebelHon and the reunion of the States 
could not have been realized except for Grant. Until 
he appeared upon the scene the war had been a bloody 
and magnificent failure. The cumulative and concen- 
trated passions of the Confederacy had fused the whole 
people into an army of aggression and defense. The 
North, without passion or vindictiveness, fought with 
gloved hands, at the expense of thousands of lives and 
fatal blows to prestige and credit. The lesson was 
learned that a good brigadier, an able general of division, 
a successful corps commander, might be paralyzed 
under the burden of supreme responsibility. Victories 
were fruitless, defeats disastrous, delays demoralizing, 
until the spirit of war entered the camp in the person 
of Ulysses S. Grant. Without sentiment or passion, 
he believed that every reverse could be retrieved and 
victory should be followed with the annihilation of the 
enemy's forces. "My terms are unconditional surren- 
der; I move immediately upon your works," was the 
legend of Donelson, which proclaimed the new method 
of warfare. He hurled his legions against the ramparts 
of V'icksburg, sacrificing thousands of lives which might 
have been saved by delay, but saved the loss of tens of 
thousands by malarial fever and camp diseases, and pos- 
sibly at the expense of defeat. He believed that the 
river of blood shed to-day, and followed by immediate 
results, was infinitely more merciful to friend and foe 
than the slower disasters of war which make the heca- 
tombs of the dead. 

From the surrender of Vicksburg rose the sun of 
national unity to ascend to the zenith at Appomattox, 



CHA UNCE V M. DEPE W. 169 

and never to set. Where all others had failed in the 
capture of Richmond, he succeeded by processes which 
aroused the protest and horror of the country and the 
criticism of posterity— but it triumphed. For thirty 
nights in succession he gave to the battle-torn and deci- 
mated army the famous order, "By the left flank, for- 
ward": and for thirty days hurled them upon the ever- 
succeeding breastworks and ramparts of the enemy. 
But it was with the same inexorable and indomitable 
idea that, with practically inexhaustible resources be- 
hind him, the rebellion could be hammered to death. 

As Grant fought without vindictiveness or feeling of 
revenge, in the supreme moment of victory the soldier 
disappeared and the patriot and statesman took his 
place. He knew that the exultation of the hour would 
turn to ashes in the future unless the surrendered rebel 
soldier became a loyal citizen. He knew that the Re- 
public could not hold vassal provinces by the power of 
the bayonet and live. He returned arms, gave food, 
transportation, horses, stock, and said, "Cultivate your 
farms and patriotism." And they did. Whatever 
others may have done, the Confederate soldier has 
never violated the letter or the spirit of that parole. 

All other conquerors have felt that the triumphal en- 
try into the enemy's capital should be the crowning 
event of the war. The Army of the Potomac had been 
seeking to capture Richmond for four years, and when 
the hour arrived for the victorious procession Grant 
halted it, that no memory of humiliation should stand 
in the way of the rebel capital becoming once more the 
capital of a loyal State. 

The curse of power is flattery; the almost inevitable 



I70 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

concomitant of greatness, jealousy; and yet no man 
ever lived who so rejoiced in the triumph of others as 
General Grant. This imperturbable man hailed the 
victories of his generals with wild delight. Sheridan, 
riding down the valley, reversing the tide of battle, fall- 
ing with resistless blows upon the enemy until they 
surrendered, drew from his admiring commander the 
exulting remark to the country : "Behold one of the 
greatest generals of this or any other age." His com- 
panion and steadfast friend through all his campaigns, 
the only man who rivaled him in genius and the affec- 
tions of his countrymen, the most accomplished soldier 
and superb tactician, who broke the source of supply 
and struck the deadliest blow in the march from Atlanta 
to the sea, received at every step of his career the most 
generous recognition of his services and abilities. He 
knew and was glad that the march of Xenophon and 
the ten thousand Greeks, which had been the inspira- 
tion of armies for over two thousand years, would be 
replaced, for the next two thousand, by the resistless 
tramp of Sherman and his army. 

Grant was always famous among his soldiers for the 
rare quality of courage in the presence of danger. But 
the country is indebted to him for a higher faculty, 
which met and averted a peril of the gravest character. 
One of the most extraordinary and singular men who 
ever filled a great place was Andrew Johnson. He was 
a human paradox of conflicting qualities, great and 
.small, generous and mean, bigoted and broad, patriotic 
and partisan. He loved his country with a passionate 
devotion, but would have destroyed it to rebuild it 
upon his own model. Born a poor white, hating with 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. 171 

the intensity of wounded pride the better and dominant 
class, in a dehrium of revenge and vindictiveness he 
shouted, "Treason is odious and must be punished," and 
by drumhead court-martial or summary process at law 
would have executed every one of the Confederate 
generals, and left behind a vendetta to disturb the peace 
of uncounted generations. Between their execution 
and this madman appears the calm and conquering 
force of General Grant, with the declaration: "My pa- 
role is the honor of the nation." When, swinging to 
the other extreme, and in the exercise of doubtful 
power, the President would have reversed the results 
of the war by reorganizing a government upon the lines 
which he thought best, he was again met by this same 
determined purpose, exclaiming: "My bayonets will 
again be the salvation of the nation." 

General Grant will live in history as the greatest sol- 
dier of his time, but it will never be claimed for him 
that he was the best of Presidents. No man, however 
remarkable his endowments, could fill that position 
with supreme ability unless trained and educated for 
the task. He said to a well-known publicist in the last 
days of his second term : "You have criticised severely 
my administration in your newspaper; in some cases 
you were right, in others wrong. I ask this of you, in 
fairness and justice, that in summing up the results of 
my presidency, you will only say that General Grant, 
having had no preparation for civil office, performed its 
duties conscientiously and according to the best of his 
abiHty." 

The times of reconstruction presented problems which 
required the highest qualities of statesmanship and 



172 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

business. In the unfamiliarity with the business of a 
great commercial nation General Grant did not, how- 
ever, differ much from most of the men who have been 
successful or defeated candidates for the Presidency of 
the United States. It is a notable fact that though we 
are the only purely industrial nation in the world, we 
have never selected our rulers from among the great 
business men of the country. And the conditions and 
prejudices of success present insuperable obstacles to 
such a choice. Yet Grant's administration will live in 
history for two acts of supreme importance. When the 
delirium of fiat money would have involved the nation 
in bankruptcy, his great name and fame alone served to 
win the victory for honest money and to save the 
credit and prosperity of the Republic. He, the first 
soldier of his time, gave the seal of his great authority 
to the settlement of international disputes by arbi- 
tration. 

The quality of his greatness was never so conspicuous 
as in the election of General Garfield. He carried with 
him around the world the power and majesty of the 
American nation — he had been the companion of kings 
and counselor of cabinets. His triumphal march had 
belted the globe, and through the Golden Gate of the 
Pacific he entered once more his own land, expecting 
to receive the nomination of his party for a third term 
for the Presidency. In the disappointment of defeat 
and the passions it involved, the election of the nomi- 
nee of that Convention depended entirely upon him. 
Had he remained in his tent, Garfield would never have 
been President of the United States; but gathering all 
the chieftains, and commanding them, when they would 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. 173 

sulk or retire, to accompany him to the front, his ap- 
pearance in the canvass won the victory. 

He was at West Point only to be a poor scholar and 
to graduate with little promise and less expectancy 
from his instructors. In the barter and trade of his 
Western home he was invariably cheated. As a subal- 
tern officer in the Mexican War, which he detested, he 
simply did his duty and made no impress upon his com- 
panions or superiors. As a wood-seller he was beaten 
by all the wood-choppers of Missouri. As a merchant 
he could not compete with his rivals. As a clerk he 
was a listless dreamer, and yet the moment supreme 
command devolved upon him the dross disappeared, 
dullness and indifference gave way to a clarified intel- 
lect which grasped the situation with the power of inspi- 
ration. The larger the field, the greater the peril, the 
more mighty the results dependent upon the issue, the 
more superbly he rose to all the requirements of the 
emergency. From serene heights unclouded by pas- 
sion, jealousy, or fear, he surveyed the whole boundless 
field of operations, and with unerring skill forced each 
part to work in harmony with the general plan. The 
only commander who never lost a battle, his victories 
were not luck, but came from genius and pluck. 

Caesar surpassed him, because he was both a great 
soldier and a great statesman ; but he was immeasura- 
bly inferior to Grant, because his ambition was superior 
to his patriotism. Frederick the Great and Napoleon 
the First reveled in war for its triumphs and its glory, 
but General Grant, reviewing that most superb of arm- 
ies beside the Emperor and Von Moltke and Bismarck, 
electrified the military nations of Europe by proclaim- 



1/4 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

ing his utter detestation of war. The motto which ap- 
pearcd in the sky at the consummation of his victories, 
and was as distinct as the cross to Constantine, was' 
"Let us have peace." Under its inspiration he returned 
to Lee his sword. He stood between the Confederate 
leaders and the passions of the hour, and with his last 
breath repeated it as a solemn injunction and legacy to 
his countrymen. As his spirit hovers over us to-night, 
let the sentiment be the active principle of our faith.' 
He meant that political divisions of our country, inevita- 
ble and necessary for its freedom and prosperity, should 
not be upon sectional lines. A solid North has been 
broken. The solid South must disappear. On these 
broad lines, supplemented from time to time with the 
immediate questions of the hour, partisanship is always 
withm patriotic limits, and the successful party is the 
best judgment of the people. 

We leave this hall to carry into the Presidential can- 
vass our best efforts for the success of the principles 
in which we severally believe, the parties which we 
severally love, and the candidates we honor; but let us 
labor to bring about such conditions all over this coun- 
try that we may f^ght our political battles under the 
common banner of patriotism and peace 



CHA UNCE V M. DEPE W. i 7 5 



XII. 

ADDRESS AT THE MEMORIAL SERVICE OF PRESI- 
DENT James A. Garfield, by the Grand Army 
OF THE Republic, at Chickering Hall, New 
York, September 26, 1881. 



My Friends: 

We have met together many times in the long years 
past, on occasions serious and trifling, sad and joyful ; 
for the hot discussion of politics, for the purpose of 
commemorating historical and patriotic events, and to 
strew with flowers and eulogiums the graves of our he- 
roic dead ; but never before have we assembled when 
we were only the units of universal and all-embracing 
grief. The world is in tears. The sun in its course has 
for the past two months greeted with its morning rays 
a never-ending succession of kneeling millions, suppli- 
cating the heavenly throne to spare the life of General 
Garfield ; and during the last few days it has set upon 
them bowed in sorrow for his death. This intense in- 
terest has been limited by neither boundaries nor nation- 
alities. It has belted the globe with mourning. Why 
has this calamity touched the chords of universal sym- 
pathy? Heroes and statesmen have died before, but 
never before have all civilized people felt the loss their 
own. The glory of the battle-field has mingled exul- 
tation with the soldier's agony. Statesmen have closed 



176 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

a long and distinguished career, but the loss has been 
relieved by the reflection that such is the common lot 
of all. Lincoln's murder was recognized as the expir- 
ing stroke of a dying cause. The assassination of him 
who was the savior of Holland and the hope of the 
liberty of his time, was felt to be the fruit of implaca- 
ble feud and religious strife; but the shot at Garfield 
was the most causeless, purposeless, and wicked crime 
of the century. No section, no party, no faction, desired 
his death. It had no accessories in public vengeance or 
private malice. The President was a strong, brave, 
pure man in the prime of his powers; the trusted Ex- 
ecutive of fifty millions of people ; the title to his office 
unquestioned, and the nation unanimous in the purpose 
that he should develop his policy and fulfill his mission. 
Such a life and career so ruthlessly broken arouses hor- 
ror and sympathy. But the love, reverence, and sad- 
ness of this hour is due to the fact that the man him- 
self, in his strength and weakness, in his struggles and 
triumphs, in his friendships and enmities, in his rela- 
tions to mother, wife, and children, and in his battle 
with death, was the best type of manhood. He was 
not one of those historical heroes, with the human ele- 
ment so far eliminated that, while we admire the char- 
acter, we rejoice that it exists only in books and on 
canvas, but a man like ourselves, with like passions and 
feelings, but possessed of such greatness and goodness 
that the higher we estimated him, the nearer and dearer 
he became to us. In America and Europe he is recog- 
nized as an illustrious example of the results of free in- 
.stitutions. His career shows what can be accomplished 
where all avenues are open and exertion is untram- 



tiiAUNCEY M. DEPEW. iji 

meied. Our annals afford no such incentive to youth 
as does his life, and it will become one of the Repub- 
lic's household stories. No boy in poverty almost hope- 
less, thirsting for knowledge, meets an obstacle which 
Garfield did not experience and overcome. No youth 
despairing in darkness feels a gloom which he did not 
dispel. No young man filled with honorable ambition 
can encounter a dif^culty which he did not meet and 
surmount. For centuries to come great men will trace 
their rise from humble origin to the inspirations of that 
lad who learned to read by the light of a pine-knot 
in a log cabin ; who, ragged and barefooted, trudged 
along the tow-path of the canal, and without ancestry 
behind to impel him forward, without money or afflu- 
ent relations, without friends or assistance, by faith in 
himself and in God, became the most scholarly and best 
equipped statesman of his time, one of the foremost 
soldiers of his country, the best debater in the strong- 
est of deliberative bodies, the leader of his party, and 
the Chief Magistrate of fifty millions of people before 
he was fifty years of age. We are not here to question 
the ways of Providence. Our prayers were not an- 
swered as we desired, though the volume and fervor of 
our importunity seemed resistless; but, already, behind 
the partially lifted veil we see the fruits of the sacrifice. 
Old wounds are healed and fierce feuds forgotten. 
Vengeance and passion, which have survived the best 
statesmanship of twenty years, are dispelled by a com- 
mon sorrow. Love follows sympathy. Over this open 
grave the cypress and willow are indissolubly entwined, 
and in it are buried all sectional differences and ha- 
treds. The North and South rise from bended knees to 



>78 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

embrace in the brotherhood of a common people and 
reunited countr>^ Not this alone, but the humanity of 
the civilized world has been quickened and elevated, 
and the English-speaking people are nearer to-day in 
peace and unity than ever before. There is no lan- 
guage in which petitions have not arisen for Garfield's 
life, and no clime where tears have not fallen for his 
death. The Queen of the proudest of nations, for the 
first time in our recollection, brushes aside the formali- 
ties of diplomacy, and, descending from the throne 
speaks for her own heart and the hearts of all her 
people in the cablegram to the afflicted wife which 
says: "Myself and my children mourn with you " 

It was my privilege to talk for hours with General 
Garfield during his famous trip to the xXew York con- 
ference in the late canvass, and yet it was not conver- 
sation or discussion. He fastened upon me all the 
powers of inquisitiveness and acquisitiveness, and ab- 
sorbed all I had learned in twenty years of the politics 
of this State. Under this restless and resistless cravin^ 
or information, he drew upon all the resources of the 
I.braries, gathered all the contents of the newspapers 
and sought and sounded the opinions of all around him 
and ,n his broad, clear mind the vast mass was so as^ 

accepted as true and wise. And yet it was by the -ush 
and warmth of old college-chum ways, and n't by^he 
never l'' '"^^'^'^O'-. that when he had gained, he 
■ cKx r ' ";'• "'^ ^^""^^^^ ^-^ - as'certai;ing 

^ol 1" al K. "^" Convention, and whenever that 
popular assemblage seemed drifting into hopel 



less con- 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. I79 

fusion, his tall form commanded attention and his clear 
voice and clearer utterances instantly gave the accepted 
solution. 

I arrived at his house at Mentor in the early morning 
following the disaster in Maine. While all about him 
were in a panic, he saw only a danger which must and 
could be repaired. "It is no use bemoaning the past," 
he said — "the past has no uses except for its lessons." 
Business disposed of, he threw aside all restraint, and 
for hours his speculations and theories upon philoso- 
phy, government, education, eloquence ; his criticisms 
of books; his reminiscences of men and events, have 
made that one of the white-letter days of my life. At 
Chickamauga he won his major-general's commission. 
On the anniversary of the battle he died. I shall never 
forget his description of the fight — so modest, yet 
graphic. It is imprinted on my memory as the most 
glorious battle-picture words ever painted. He thought 
the greatest calamity which could befall a man was to 
lose ambition. I said to him : "General, did you ever 
in your earlier struggle have that feeling I have so often 
met with, Avhen you would have compromised your 
whole future for a certainty — and, if so, what?" "Yes," 
said he, "I remember well when I would have been will- 
ing to exchange all the possibilities of my life for the 
certainty of a position as a successful teacher." Though 
he died neither a school principal nor college profes- 
sor — and they seem humble achievements compared 
with what he did — his memory will instruct while time 
endures. 

His long and dreadful sickness lifted the roof from 
his house and family circle, and his relations as son, 



l8o ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

husband, and father stood revealed in the broadest sun- 
light of publicity. The picture endeared him wherever 
is understood the full significance of that matchless 
word, "home." When he stood by the Capitol, just 
pronounced the President of the greatest and most 
powerful of republics, the exultation of the hour found 
its expression in a kiss upon the lips of his mother. 
For weeks in distant Ohio she sat by the gate, watch- 
ing for the hurrying feet of the messenger bearing the 
telegrams of hope or despair. His last conscious act 
was to write a letter of cheer and encouragement to 
that mother, and when the blow fell she illustrated the 
spirit she had instilled in him. There were no rebel- 
lious murmurings against the Divine dispensation, only 
in utter agony: " I have no wish to live longer; I will 
join him soon ; the Lord's will be done." When Dr. 
Bliss told him he had a bare chance of recovery: 
"Then," said he, "we will take that chance, doctor." 
When asked if he suffered pain, he answered: "If you 
can imagine a trip-hammer crashing on your body, or 
cramps, such as you have in the water, a thousand 
times intensified, you can have some idea of what I 
suffer." And yet during those eighty-one days was 
heard neither groan nor complaint. Always brave and 
cheerful, he answered the fear of the surgeons with the 
remark: "I have faced Death before, I am not afraid to 
meet him now"; and again: "I have strength enough 
left to meet him yet"; and he could whisper to the 
.Secretary of the Treasury an inquiry about the success 
of the funding scheme, and ask the Postmaster-General 
how much public money he had saved. 

His fust thought when borne to the White House 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEIV. l8l 

was not for himself, but for his wife sick at Elberon. 
He sent her an assuring message, bidding her come, re- 
ceived her with a cheerful and smiling welcome, and 
when she had left the room he said to the wife of a Cabi- 
net Minister: "How does Crete bear it?" "Like the 
wife of a true soldier," was the reply. "Ah, the dear 
little woman!" he exclaimed; "I would rather die than 
that this should cause a relapse to her." Scanning with 
loving eyes her watchful and anxious face weeks after- 
ward, he drew down her head and whispered : "Go 
out, dear, and drive before the sun gets too hot ; I 
would go with you if I didn't have so much business 
to attend to; you will, I am sure, excuse me." 

Forbidden to talk, he established with his lifelong 
friends and constant watchers. General Swaim and 
Colonel Rockwell, a system by which, in the knowledge 
gained by the intimacy of years, single words stood for 
ideas. Williams College Commencement, to which he 
was going Avhen he was shot, was mentioned. The old 
familiar alumni assemblage became present to his mind, 
and what were they saying of him? "Tenderness?" he 
said to Rockwell. "Measureless," was the reply, and 
he had gathered the spirit of that memorable meeting. 
In answer to an inquiry General Swaim said to me : 
"The most hopeful, courageous, and calm observer of 
the case is General Garfield himself. He has so com- 
pletely eliminated his personality, that he thinks and 
acts as if General Garfield had unusual and extraordi- 
nary opportunities to study the condition of the Presi- 
dent of the United States, and an uncommon duty to 
preserve his life." 

iVs he lay in the cottage by the sea, looking out upon 



1 82 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

the ocean, whose broad expanse was in harmony with 
his own grand nature, and heard the beating of the 
waves upon the shore, and felt the pulsations of millions 
of hearts against his chamber door, there was no posing 
for history and no preparation of last words for dramatic 
effect. With simple naturalness he gave the military 
salute to the sentinel gazing at his window, and that 
soldier, returning it in tears, will proudly carry its mem- 
ory' to his dying day, and transmit it to his children. 
The voice of his faithful wife came from her devotions 
in another room, singing: "Guide me, O Thou Great 
Jehovah." "Listen," he cries, "is not that glorious?" 
And in a few hours Heaven's portals opened, and up- 
borne upon such prayers as never before wafted spirit 
above, he entered the presence of God. It is the alle- 
viation of all sorrow, public or private, that close upon 
it press the duties of and to the living. 

The whole nation unites in smoothing the pathway 
of the revered and beloved mother, and caring for the 
noble wife and her children. But, as citizens, let us 
remove from our institutions the incentives to assassina- 
tion. The President is of one school, the Vice-Presi- 
dent of another. The President of the Senate, next in 
succession, is of one party, the Speaker of the House 
of the other. A million of needy or ambitious men be- 
siege the President for the hundred thousand places in 
his gift. In a change is a perpetual opportunity to 
retrieve a failure, and murder forever lurks in this 
concentration and distribution of patronage. Let the 
President be the con.stitutional ruler of the Republic, 
and the civil service placed on a business basis. Let us 
render our cordial support to him who under these try- 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. 183 

ing circumstances succeeds to this high office. "God 
reigns and the Government at Washington still lives," 
was the Christian soldier's shout with which General 
Garfield stopped the maddened mob when Lincoln was 
killed. Arthur is President. He needs the confidence 
and encouragement of the people, and will prove wor- 
thy of the trust which has devolved upon him. The 
tolling bells, the minute guns upon land and sea, the 
muffled drums and funeral hymns, fill the air while 
our chief is borne to his last resting-place. The busy 
world is stilled for the hour when loving hands are pre- 
paring the grave. A stately shaft will rise overlooking 
the lake and commemorating his deeds; but his fame 
will not live alone in marble or brass. His story will 
be treasured and kept warm in the hearts of millions for 
generations to come, and boys, hearing it from their 
mothers, will be fired with nobler ambitions. To his 
countrymen he will always be a typical American citi- 
zen, soldier, and statesman. A year ago, and not a 
thousand people of the Old World had ever heard his 
name ; and now there is scarcely a thousand who do 
not mourn his loss. The peasant loves him because 
from the same humble lot he became one of the mighty 
of earth, and sovereigns respect him because in- his royal 
gifts and kingly nature God made him their peer. 



l84 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 



A 



XIII. 

ddress at the memorial service by the 
Legislature of the State of New York, 
FOR President Chester A. Arthur, in the 
Assembly Chamber at Albany, Wednesday 
Evening, April 20, 1887. 



Gentlemen of the Senate and Assembly of the 
State of New York : 

The twenty-first President of the United States was 
the third from the State of New York who had filled 
that high ofificc. The administration and personal career 
of each of them form marked features of our national 
history. The conditions which prepared them for pub- 
lic duty were strikingly alike. Each was the sole archi- 
tect of his own fortunes and without the aid of family 
or wealth. They were of the type of most of the men 
who have always controlled parties and managed the 
Government. Receiving in their youth the training 
and influence of Christian homes, starting in life with 
no other endowment than health, character, courage, 
and honorable ambition, they became leaders and rulers 
in their generations. The historian of the future will 
fill most of his pages devoted to our first century with 
the rise and fall of the slave power. In that story the 
parts of Martin Van Buren, Millard Fillmore, and Ches- 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. 1 85 

ter A. Arthur will be of dramatic interest. The revolt 
of Van Buren in 1848 was the first organized effort 
for freedom which had strength or votes. It assailed 
slavery in its strongest intrenchment, its hold upon the 
old parties. In paving the way for their dissolution it 
opened the road for the union, upon this vital issue, of 
men hitherto arrayed against each other in hostile 
camps. With Van Buren as its leader, the anti-slavery 
sentiment crystalized into a powerful and aggressive or- 
ganization. It broke up associations which had existed 
since the formation of the Government, alarmed and 
infuriated the adherents of slavery, and prepared the 
way for the inevitable conflict. Millard Fillmore sought 
to stay the storm by compromise ; but when he signed 
the Fugitive Slave Law the storm became a cyclone. 
The enforcement of the law brought the horrors of 
slavery to every door ; it aroused the old fire which had 
charged with Cromwell on the field and expounded 
liberty through Mansfield on the bench ; it united the 
North in a solemn determination to save the country 
and free the Constitution from the dangers and dis- 
grace of the system ; it consolidated the South for a 
struggle to the death for its preservation. The years 
following of agitation and preparation, the appeal to 
arms, the Civil War with its frightful sacrifices of blood 
and treasure, the triumph of nationality and liberty, the 
reconstruction of the states upon the broadest and most 
generous principles, the citizenship of the freedman, the 
reconciliation of the rebel, gave first to President Ar- 
thur the glorious opportunity and privilege of con- 
structing a message which most significantly marked 
the happy end of a century of strife, by its failure to 



1 86 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

allude to its causes, remedies, or results. Thus the first 
of the New York Presidents gave to anti-slavery a 
national party; the second by an effort to compromise 
with evil brought on the battle which ended in its de- 
struction; and the administration of the third saw the 
regenerated and reunited Republic rising upon its ruins. 
A small cottage, in a sparsely settled rural neighbor- 
hood of over half a century ago, a scant salary, the un- 
selfish sacrifices which a large family and narrow means 
necessitate — these were the physical surroundings which 
fitted Chester A. Arthur for his life's work. His fath- 
er, a clergyman of vigorous intellect and ripe learning, 
his mother, a pious, cultured woman, gave to him by 
precept and example the character and courage which 
both in resistance and action win and worthily occupy 
the most commanding positions. All the marked suc- 
cesses among our people have resulted from the spur 
of necessity. It has not been the poverty which dwarfs 
and discourages, but the opportunity and incentive for 
larger fields of usefulness and for the gratification of 
higher ambitions. The narrow limits of his little home 
became each day an expanding horizon inviting the 
boy to exploration and conquest. From his father he 
inherited that sturdy Scotch-Irish blood, which for 
centuries has shown conspicuous aptitude for govern- 
ment and leadership, and he was early taught that, with 
liberal education, backed by the principles in which he 
was grounded, all gates could be unbarred and all ave- 
nues were open to him. With these motives work was 
pleasure, and difficulties were delights, in the fresh 
strength and confidence with which they were success- 
ively overcome. The accepted hardships of teaching 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. 187 

the country school and boarding around ; the distrac- 
tions of earnTng a living while fighting for a degree; 
toughen and develop the elastic fibers of American 
character. When Arthur had won the maximum hon- 
ors of his college, and completing his law-studies was 
admitted to the bar, he was already a victor in the bat- 
tle of life, and knew there were no dangers before him 
so great as those he had already overcome. The pro- 
fession did not receive in him its frequent addition of a 
raw recruit whose steps have been so tenderly watched 
and taken for him that he stands with difficulty and 
moves with timidity, but he had tested his powers and 
felt the confidence of a veteran. 

It was natural that with his origin and training Gen- 
eral Arthur should at once have enrolled on the side of 
anti-slavery. It was fortunate for his future that the 
opportunity came early to participate in a legal contest 
which was one of the decisive battles of that long strug- 
gle. Jonathan Lemmon, a Virginia slaveholder, under- 
took to remove to Texas by way of New York, carry- 
ing his slaves with him. The Court was asked to dis- 
charge them on the ground that no man could be de- 
prived of his liberty in this State without the authority 
of the law. Virginia, through her Governor and Legis- 
lature, took up the cause of the slave-holder, and the 
Legislature of our State responded by employing coun- 
sel for the slaves. The most eminent men at the bar 
appeared on the one side or the other. The whole na- 
tion became interested in the conflict, and mutterings of 
war were heard. Barriers were to be set to the encroach- 
ments of slavery, or it was to be virtually established 
everywhere. Political passions, commercial timidity, 



l8S ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

moral convictions, swayed and agitated the press and 
the courts. Behind the States'-rights and vested-prop- 
erty arguments of the lawyers for Virginia were the 
threats of a dissolution of the Union which had so often 
frightened Northern constituencies, and cowed North- 
ern statesmen ; but the advocates of liberty, with un- 
equaled boldness and ability, pressed home the eternal 
principles of freedom embodied in the charters of the 
F"atherland, and embedded in our American declara- 
tions and constitutions ; and our highest tribunal reiter- 
ated, with phrase altered for us, Mansfield's immortal 
judgment, " A slave cannot breathe the air of Eng- 
land." The same decision had been eloquently and 
vigorously rendered by William H, Seward while Gov- 
ernor of our State years before, but it received little at- 
tention or approval. Then, as often afterwards, this 
great statesman was nearly a generation in advance of 
his contemporaries on the most important of questions. 
While this case settled the status of the slave brought 
within our jurisdiction, the rights of free colored people 
in our midst were violated daily. General Arthur 
championed the cause of a poor woman, who, because 
of her race, was refused a seat and ejected from a car; 
and in the success of the litigation, principles which 
after the Civil War could only receive recognition 
and obedience by Congressional enactment and consti- 
tutional amendment became parts of the fixed juris- 
prudence of the State. He was never a briUiant advo- 
cate. He did not possess those rare qualities which win 
verdicts from unwilling juries and force decisions from 
hostile courts; but he early took and held the impor- 
tant place of wise and safe counsel and adviser. Tact, 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. 189 

sense, and quick appreciation of the right were quali- 
ties he possessed in such high degree, that they were 
the elements of his success, not only at the bar, but 
in the administration of public trusts. 

This sol impressed Governor Morgan that he assigned 
him to the most important position of recruiting and 
equipping New York's quota in the President's call for 
troops. The situation was of unparalleled novelty and 
danger. Generations of peace and prosperity had left 
the State with a holiday military system, and ignorant 
ot war. The problems of camps, depots, supplies, arma- 
ments, transportation, which require a liberal educa- 
tion to solve, were suddenly precipitated upon men un- 
prepared and untrained. To collect, feed, uniform, arm, 
and forward to the front tens of thousands of raw re- 
cruits, required great ability and unimpeachable integ- 
rity. An army larger than the combined Continental 
forces of the Revolution was marching to Washington 
from New York by regiments as completely equipped 
as they were hastily gathered. The pressing needs of 
the Government on the one hand, and the greed of the 
contractor on the other, were spurs and perils of the 
organizing officer. It is one of the proudest records 
of General Arthur's life that he surrendered his position 
to a successor of hostile political faith, to receive from 
him the highest compliments for his work and to re- 
turn to his profession a poorer man than when he as- 
sumed office. 

Activit)'' in public affairs and strong political bias 
were inevitable in a man of such experience and char- 
acteristics. The fate of the empire depended upon 
the issue of the tremendous questions which agitated 



IQO ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

the country during these years. Party spirit ran high, 
and jxirties were organized and officered like contend- 
ing armies. A great party must have leadership and 
discipline. Revolts become necessary at times against 
corrupt, incompetent, or selfish leadership, but constitu- 
tional government cannot be successfully conducted by 
political guerrillas and bushwhackers. If the common 
judgment of mankind is the voice of God, the control- 
ling sentiment of great parties is their best policies ; but 
that sentiment must needs be voiced and receive ex- 
pression in the practical measures of government by 
commanding authority. There have been in our history 
few party leaders of the first class, who possessed those 
wonderful gifts which secure the confidence and sway 
the actions of vast masses of men ; but there have been 
many who could combine and consolidate the organi- 
zation for work in the field when the canvass was criti- 
cal. Among these General Arthur held a high rank, 
and the length and vigor of his rule, and the loyal de- 
votion of his friends, were lasting tributes to his merits. 
It was the natural result that the President should re- 
quire him to hold a representative position. The Col- 
Icctorship of the Port of New York was at that time 
the key to the political fortunes of the administration. 
The Collector was in a .sense a cabinet officer, the dis- 
penser of party patronage, and the business agent of 
the Government at the commercial capital of the nation. 
The peculiar difficulties of the place had permanently 
consigned to private life every man who ever held it. 
I o make mistakes, to provoke calumny, to create enmi- 
ties, were the peculiar opportunities of the office. That 
Arthur should have been unanimously confirmed for a 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. I9I 

second term and died ex-President of the United States 
are the best evidences of his integrity, wisdom, and tact. 
A long lease of power creates not only a desire for 
change, but develops' internal antagonisms. Both these 
dangers were very threatening in the campaign of 1880. 
The first was a present and increasing force, and success 
was impossible unless all discordant elements were har- 
monized. Garfield and Arthur, as the representatives 
of the hostile factions, were singularly fitted to accom- 
plish this result. Their selection contributed enorm- 
ously to the triumph of their cause. Garfield, the boy 
on the tow-path, the university alumnus, the learned 
professor, the college president, the gallant soldier, the 
congressional leader, the United States Senator and bril- 
liant orator, enthusiastic, generous, and impulsive, pre- 
sented a most picturesque, captivating, and dashing 
candidate ; while Arthur's cool judgment, unequaled 
skill, commanding presence, and rare gifts for conciliat- 
ing and converting revengeful partisans into loyal and 
eager followers, brought behind his chief a united and 
determined party. But no sooner was the victory won, 
than the internal strife was renewed with intensified 
bitterness. In demonstrating the evils and power of 
patronage, it gave effective impetus to the triumph of 
Civil Service Reform. The struggle was transferred 
from Washington to Albany, and this Capitol became 
the field for the most envenomed and passionate con- 
test of the century. The whole Republic was involved 
in the conflict. Upon it depended the control of the 
Government. Vice-President Arthur, whose loyalty to 
his friends was the central motive of his life, deemed it 
his duty to come here and take command of the forces 



192 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

on the one side, while a share in the conduct of the 
other devolved upon me. The murderous fury of the 
fray dissolved friendships of a lifetime, but I hail with 
profound gratification the fact that ours survived it. 
The bullet of Guiteau struck down President Garfield, 
and in the whirlwind of resentment and revenge, General 
Arthur, by the very necessity of his position, became 
the object of most causeless and cruel suspicion and 
assault. But in that hour the real greatness of his char- 
acter became resplendent. The politician gave place 
to the statesman, and the partisan to the President. As 
a spent ball having missed its mark is buried in the 
heart of a friend, so the dying passions of the Civil War 
by one mad and isolated crime murdered Abraham Lin- 
coln, the one man in the country who had the power 
and disposition to do at once, for those whom the as- 
sassin proposed to help and avenge, all that was after- 
wards accomplished through many years of probation, 
humiliation, and suffering. But in the death of Gar- 
field the Spoils System, which dominated parties, made 
and unmade statesmen, shaped the policy of the Gov- 
ernment, and threatened the integrity and perpetuity 
of our institutions, received a fatal blow. It aroused 
the country to the perils both to the proper conduct of 
the business of the Government and to the Government 
itself. 

A morbid sentiment that the civil service was a Pre- 
torian Guard, to be recruited from the followers of the 
successful chief without regard to the fitness of the 
officer removed or the qualifications of the man who 
took his place, created the moral monstrosity — Guiteau. 
The Spoils System murdered Garfield, and the murder 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. 193 

of Garfield shattered the system. The months during 
which President Garfield lay dying by the sea at El- 
beron were phenomenal in the history of the world. 
The sufferer became a member of every household in 
the land, and in all countries, tongues, and creeds, sym- 
pathetic prayers ascended to God for the recovery of 
the great ruler beyond the ocean, who had sprung from 
the common people and illustrated the possibilities for 
the individual where all men are equal before the law. 
While he who was to succeed him if he died, though in 
no place in and in no sense charged with sympathy with 
the assassination, yet was made to feel a national re- 
sentment and distrust which threatened his usefulness 
and even his life. Whether he spoke or was silent, he 
was alike misrepresented and misunderstood. None 
but those most intimate with him can ever know the 
agony he suffered during those frightful days, and how 
earnestly he prayed that in the returning health of his 
chief he might be spared the fearful trial of his death. 
When the end came for General Garfield, Arthur en- 
tered the White House as he had taken the oath of 
ofifice — alone. A weaker man would have succumbed ; 
a narrower one, have seized upon the patronage and en- 
deavored to build up his power by strengthening his 
faction ; but the lineage and training of Arthur stood 
in this solemn and critical hour for patriotism and manli- 
ness. Friends, co-workers within the old lines, and 
associates under the old conditions, looking for oppor- 
tunities for recognition or for revenge, retired chas- 
tened and enlightened from the presence of the Presi- 
dent of the United States. The man had not changed. 
He was the same genial, companionable, and loving 



194 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

gentleman, but in the performance of public duty he 
rose to the full measure and dignity of his great ofifice. 
It was the process which has been witnessed before 
among our statesmen, where under the pressure of sud- 
den and grave responsibilities the evolution of character 
and capacity which would, under ordinary conditions, 
have taken a lifetime, or perhaps never matured, culmi- 
nates in a moment. The most remarkable examples in 
our history were Abraham Lincoln and, in a lesser de- 
gree, Edwin M. Stanton and Salmon P. Chase. The cold 
and hesitating constituency which expected the Presi- 
dent to use for the personal and selfish ends and ambi- 
tions of himself and friends the power so suddenly and 
unexpectedly acquired, saw the Chief Magistrate of a 
mighty nation so performing his duties, so administer- 
ing his trust, so impartially acting for the public inter- 
ests and the public welfare, that he entered upon the 
second year of his term in the full possession of the 
confidence of his countrymen. 

The grateful task of review and portrayal of the his- 
tory of his administration has been most worthily as- 
signed in these ceremonies to the learned, eloquent, 
and eminent lawyer who was the Attorney-General in 
his Cabinet. 

President Arthur will be distinguished both for what 
he chd and what he refrained from doing. The strain 
and intensity of public feeling, the vehemence of the 
angry and vindictive passions of the time, demanded 
the rarest of negative as well as positive qualities. The 
calm and even course of government allayed excite- 
ment and appealed to the better judgment of the 
people. I^ut though not aggressive or brilliant, his 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. 195 

administration was sensible and strong and admirably 
adjusted to the conditions which created and attended 
it. He spoke vigorously for the reform and improve- 
ment of the Civil Service, and when Congress, acting 
upon his suggestions, enacted the law, he constructed 
the machinery for its execution which has since accom- 
plished most satisfactory, though as yet incomplete, 
results. On questions of currency and finance he met 
the needs of public and private credit and the besjt com- 
mercial sentiment of the country. He knew the neces- 
sity for efificient coast defenses and a navy equal to the 
requirements of the age. He keenly felt the weakness 
of our merchant marine, and the total destruction of 
the proud position we had formerly held among the 
maritime nations of the world, and did what he could to 
move Congress to wise and patriotic legislation. When 
the measures of his period are crowded into oblivion by 
the rapid and ceaseless tread of the events of each hour 
in our phenomenal development and its needs, two acts 
of dramatic picturesqueness and historical significance 
will furnish themes for the orator and illustrations for 
the academic stage of the future. 

The centennial of the final surrender at Yorktown, 
which marked the end of the Revolutionary War and 
the close of English rule, was celebrated with fitting 
.splendor and appropriateness. The presence of the 
descendants of Lafayette and Steuben, as the guests of 
the nation, typified the undying gratitude of the Re- 
public for the services rendered by the great French 
patriot and his countrymen, and by the famous Ger- 
man soldier. But the President, with characteristic 
grace and tact, determined that the ceremonies should 



196 OA'.ir/O.VS AND SPEECHES OF 

also officially record that all feelings of hostility against 
the Mother Country were dead. He directed that the 
celebration should be closed by a salute fired in honor 
of the British flag, as he felicitously said, "in recogni- 
tion of the friendly relations so long and so happily 
subsisting between Great Britain and the United States, 
in the trust and confidence of peace and good will be- 
tween the two countries for all the centuries to come" ; 
and then he added the sentence which might be Ameri- 
ca's message of congratulation at the Queen's Jubilee 
this summer : "and especially as a mark of the profound 
respect entertained by the American people for the 
illustrious sovereign and gracious lady who sits upon 
the British throne." 

General Grant was dying of a lingering and most 
painful disease. Manifold and extraordinary misfor- 
tunes had befallen him, and his last days were clouded 
with great mental distress and doubt. The old soldier 
was most anxious to know that his countrymen freed 
him, and would hold his memory sacred from blame, in 
connection with the men and troubles with which he 
had become so strangely, innocently, and most inex- 
tricably involved. Whether his life should suddenly 
go out in the darkness, or be spared for an indefinite 
period, was largely dependent upon some act which 
would convey to him the confidence and admiration of 
the people. Again were illustrated both General Ar- 
thur's strong friendship and his always quick and cor- 
rect appreciation of the expression of popular sentiment. 
By timely suggestions to Congress, speedily acted upon, 
he hapjjily closed the administration by affixing as its 
last official act his signature to the nomination, which 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. 197 

was confirmed with tumultuous cheers, creating Ulysses 
S. Grant General of the Army. The news flashed to 
the hero with affectionate message rescued him from 
the grave, to enjoy for months the blissful assurance 
that comrades and countrymen had taken his character 
and career into their tender and watchful keeping. 

There has rarely been in the history of popular gov- 
ernments so great a contrast as in the public apprecia- 
tion of General Arthur at the time of his inauguration 
and when he retired from office. The President of 
whom little was expected and much feared returned to 
private life enjoying in a larger degree than most of his 
predecessors the profound respect and warm regard of 
the people, without distinction of party. He was a 
warm-hearted, social, pleasure-loving man, but capable 
of the greatest industry, endurance, and courage. He 
dearly loved to gratify his friends; but if he thought 
the public interests so required, no one could more 
firmly resist their desires or their importunities. By his 
dignity and urbanity, and his rich possession of the 
graces which attract and adorn in social intercourse, he 
gave a new charm to the hospitalities of the White 
House. Though the son of a country clergyman and 
unfamiliar with courts, in him the veteran courtiers of 
the Old World found all the culture, the proper observ- 
ance of ceremonial proprieties, and the indications of 
power which surround emperors and kings of ancient 
lineage and hereditary positions, but tempered by a 
most attractive republican simplicity. He said to me 
early in his administration: "My sole ambition is to 
enjoy the confidence of my countrymen." Toward 
this noble ideal he strove with undeviating purpose. 



19^ 0A\4rJ0.\S A\D SJ'EECnUS OF 

Even in the mistakes he made could be seen his manly 
strujjj;[le to be right. Once again in private station 
and resuming the practice of his profession, ho moved 
among his fellow-citizens receiving the homage and 
recognition which came of their pride in the way he 
had borne the honors and administered the duties of 
the Chief Magistracy of the Republic. 

In his last illness he had tlie sympathy and prayers 
of the nation: and the grand gathering of the men 
most distinguished in every department of our public 
and private life, who sorrowfully bore him to the grave, 
was the solemi\ tribute of the whole people, through 
their representatives, to his worth as a man and his emi- 
nence as a public servant. 



CHA UNCE Y M. DEPE W. 1 00 



A 



XIV. 

T)nRp:ss AT thp: Mp:mokiai, Sp:rvice hv tiik Lix;- 

ISLATUKK OK THE STATE OF NEW YoRK, FOR 

Governor Reuben R. Fenton, in the Capitol 
AT Albany, April 27, 1887. 



Gentlemen of the Senate and Assembly of the 
State of New York : 

New York has, as a rule, been remarkably fortunate 
in her Governors. Many of them have been statesmen 
of national and commanding influence. Two of them 
have served as Presidents, and two as Vice-Presidents, 
of the United States, and two others were the choice 
i){ their party for the Chief Magistracy of the Repub- 
lic. Their influence upon the policy and course of 
government has been potential. 

It is proper in this place to speak only of those who 
have joined the majority beyond the grave. There is 
no more heroic figure in Revolutionary annals than o'jr 
first Governor, George Clinton. Within an hour after 
his inauguration he was marching to the post of duty 
and danger in front of the enemy. His obstinate cour- 
age, wise generalship, and great popularity, did much 
to keep New York, full as the colony was of royalists, 
loyal to liberty and the Continental Congress. John 



200 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

Jay did more than any one save Alexander Hamilton 
to bind the discordant colonies into a harmonious con- 
federacy. De Witt Clinton, by his foresight and energy, 
made New York the Empire State, and her chief city 
the commercial metropolis of the continent. Martin 
Van Buren for nearly a quarter of a century was the 
actual ruler of the Republic, through his control and 
management of the dominant party, and he gave politi- 
cal form and substance to the anti-slavery sentiment. 
William L. Marcy, United States Senator and twice a 
Cabinet Minister, has left an indelible impress upon 
the history of his time. Silas Wright ranks among our 
ideal statesmen. He possessed the loftiest character 
and most signal ability. His ambitions were always 
subordinated to the public welfare. He could calmly 
lay aside the certainty of the Presidency when his duty, 
as he understood it, called him to serve in more hazard- 
ous but minor fields, and he was in every sense a mod- 
ern Cincinnatus. The name of .William H. Seward will 
be among the few of his generation which will survive 
in coming ages. He was the political philosopher of 
his period who alone of his contemporaries grasped the 
full meaning and inevitable result of the vast moral 
questions which agitated the country. His matchless 
genius for affairs, and unruffled judgment in the midst 
of trial and danger, kept that peace with the world 
without, which alone enabled nationality to win its vic- 
tory within. His speeches and state papers will be 
the exhaustlcss treasury from which the statesmen of 
the future will draw their best lessons and inspiration. 
Within our immediate memory the tablets upon our 
Gubernatorial mausoleum recall the public services of 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. 20 1 

John A. King, John A. Dix, Edwin D. Morgan, Ho- 
ratio Seymour, Reuben E. Fenton, and Samuel J. 
Tilden. No other State has been governed by an equal 
number of men of national influence and fame. It 
is therefore eminently proper and wise that the Legis- 
lature should commemorate, and by imposing cere- 
monial perpetuate, the history and characters of^ts de- 
parted chief magistrates. 

The one in whose honor we are here assembled 
worthily ranks with the best of his predecessors in office. 
Repeated and long-continued promotions to places of 
trust by popular suffrage are cumulative evidence of 
merit and distinction. The opportunity to rise from 
humble station to lofty positions is the common heri- 
tage of all, but they only successfully climb the slippery 
and perilous ascent, gathering fresh strength at each 
station for bolder efforts, who are easily the leaders of 
their fellows. The early settlers of Western New York 
were a hardy and enterprising race, and their children, 
roughing it in log cabins, forest clearings, and frontier ex- 
periences, were by heredity and education state-builders. 
They created farms out of the wilderness, formed com- 
munities, and organized government. It is easier for a 
man of ability to get on in a new country and with fresh 
surroundings than in the neighborhood where he was 
born. Where every one has known him from childhood, 
he often is handicapped by the unforgotten frivolities 
of youth, and reaches middle life before he has out- 
grown the feeling that he is still a boy; while as a new 
settler, he starts at once at the level of his ascertained 
capabilities. It is the peculiar distinction of Mr. Fen- 
ton that he overcame these prejudices before he was of 



202 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

age; that he became the choice of his fellow-citizens 
for positions of trust as soon as he obtained his majority ; 
and passing his life at his birthplace, he earned, at a 
period when most young men are unknown, the confi- 
dence of the people among whom he had grown up, 
and carried it with him to his grave. He saw Western 
New York expand from the forest into one of the most 
beautiful, highly cultivated, and richest sections of the 
State, teeming with an intelligent and prosperous 
population, which had founded cities, formed villages, 
erected schools, endowed colleges, and planted by every 
stream flourishing manufactories; and he remained 
throughout all this growth and until his death the fore- 
most and most distinguished citizen. He was seven 
times Supervisor of his town, and three times Chairman 
of the County Board, for five terms a member of Con- 
gress, twice Governor of this great State, United States 
Senator, and the choice of New York for Vice-President 
in the Convention which first nominated General Grant, 
This proud career was not helped by accident, or 
luck, or wealth, or family, or powerful friends. He was, 
in its best sense, both the architect and builder of his 
own fortunes. When a lad of seventeen his father 
failed in business, and the boy dropped his studies and 
professional aspirations to support the family and re- 
trieve its credit. Self-reliant but prudent, courageous 
but cautious, his audacity subject to reason, he quickly 
measured his powers and then boldly struck out for 
himself. I le traversed the virgin forests, selecting with 
unerring judgnienl the most productive tracts, and for 
years following his life was spent in logging camps and 
piloting his rafts down the Allegheny and Ohio rivers. 



CHAUNCEY M. BE FEW. 203 

The adventures, exposure, and perils of the work gave 
him an iron constitution, and knowledge of men, and 
developed his rare capacity for business. An omnivor- 
ous and intelligent reader, he became, by the light of 
blazing fires in the forest and pine knots in the cabin 
on the rafts, well educated and widely informed. At 
thirty-one he had paid his father's debts and secured a 
comfortable competence for himself. Then came the 
inevitable internal struggle with himself of the man 
who has early in life achieved an independence. He 
feels his strength, the ardor and fire of vigorous man- 
hood enlarge his vision, and he sees no limits to his 
ambitions. The divergent roads to untold wealth on 
the one side, or honors and fame on the other, are be- 
fore him, and to lead the crowd his best energies will 
be required for whichever path he selects. Mr. Fenton 
determined to devote his future to the public service, 
and henceforward his life became identified with the 
history of his times. 

He had always been a Democrat, but the great ques- 
tion which was to destroy the Whig and divide the 
Democratic Party, met him at the outset of his con- 
gressional career. Stephen A. Douglas had introduced 
into the bill organizing the territories of Kansas and 
Nebraska a section repealing that portion of the Mis- 
souri Compromise of 1820 which forever prohibited 
slavery in the new territories lying north of latitude 
thirty-six degrees and thirty minutes. In a moment 
the whole country was aflame. The slumbering con- 
science of the nation awoke with an energy which rocked 
pulpits and revolutionized colleges. The oration, the 
tract, and the madly exciting novel were potent forces 



^04 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

in the storm. The young Congressman must choose, 
and at once, between his convictions and the caucus! 
He did not hesitate. He was never afraid of his beliefs, 
and faith and courage with him always stood together! 
His maiden speech was for the inviolable preservation 
of the boundaries so solemnly set by a former genera- 
tion to the encroachments of slavery. It was the first 
speech made from either side in the House of Repre- 
sentatives against the pending crime ; it was made by 
a member of the party then dominant in the Govern- 
ment ; and its clear notes of independence and defiance 
rallied about him a determined band of young Demo- 
cratic representatives. From that day he was one of 
the leaders m the formation, and afterward in the con- 
duct, of the Republican Party. When Mr. Seward an- 
nounced the death of the Whig, and christened the 
young party Republican; and when at its first State 
Convention there fraternized under that name old 
Whigs and Democrats, Barnburners of '48, Free Soilers 
and Liberty Party men of the days of martyrdom, Reu! 
ben L. I^enton was unanimously elected as their presid- 
ing officer. ^ 

It is difficult now to realize the duties and responsi- 
bilities of a member of Congress during the Civil War 
Jle was investigating estimates and making appropria- 
tions of such appalling magnitude, that he had no prec- 
edents to guide him and no standards for compaHson. 
Amidst the tension and strain of great battles, of vic- 
ones and defeats, of the result oft-times in doubt, and 
the Capitol Itself frequently in peril, he was uprooting 
by egislation wrongs and abuses which had been em 
bedded ,n the constitutions, the laws, the decisions of 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. 205 

the courts, as well as the approving judgment of the 
people, since the formation of the Government, and pre- 
paring for the reconstruction of a new upon the ruins 
of the old Republic. Fundamental principles of human 
rights were pressing for immediate and final settlement, 
while the carnage, slaughter, and suffering without, and 
the financial and administrative perils within, the Capi- 
tol were unparalleled in the experience of nations. But, 
widely known and with a sympathetic heart, he was 
counselor, friend, and brother, for the mother searching 
for her dead, for wives looking for loved ones left wound- 
ed upon the field, for parents seeking furloughs for their 
boys in the hospital, that they might carry them home 
and tenderly nurse them back to life and health ; and by 
the soldier's bedside he gave relief, encouragement, and 
strength, or received the dying message and the last 
embrace to be faithfully borne to mourning and broken 
households in the peaceful valleys of the distant North. 
There were many men in Congress of commanding elo- 
quence and great power in debate, who received gener- 
al attention and applause ; but Mr. Fenton did not excel 
in either of these more attractive fields. He was a man 
of affairs — one of those clear-headed, constructive, and 
able business managers, whose persistent industry, com- 
prehensive grasp of details, and power to marshal them 
for practical results, made him invaluable in committee, 
where legislation is perfected and all important meas- 
ures are prepared. The people rarely know the debt 
they owe to the careful, plodding, alert members, who, 
ceaselessly working in committee-rooms, with no re- 
porters to herald their achievements and no place in 
the Congressional Record for their work, detect frauds 



2o6 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

and strangle jobs; mold crudities into laws, and de- 
velop the hidden meaning and deep-laid schemes of 
skillful and deceptive amendments; ascertain the needs 
of government, and devise the statutes for meeting 
them. They are the reliance of the cabinet minister, 
and the safety of parliamentary government. There 
are always three classes of Congressmen : the leaders 
who organize the forces of administration or opposition, 
and by speeches profound or magnetic give opinions 
to their party and educate the country to its views; 
the able and conscientious committeeman and watchful 
member; and the drones whose public usefulness is 
lost between yawns and naps. Mr. Fenton was an 
ideal representative of the second type, with some of 
the qualities of the first. He mastered his subject so 
thoroughly, and understood so well the causes and 
effects of pending issues, that his calm and lucid state- 
ments made him, upon the floor, a strong ally and a dan- 
gerous enemy. His speeches upon pensions, internal 
improvements, the regulation of emigration, the pay- 
ment of bounties, the repeal of the Fugitive Slave Law, 
and the financial measures for carrying on the war, and 
funding the national debt, attest the extent of his ac- 
quirements and the wisdom of his views. 

But his distinction during this period was, that he 
came to be pre-eminently recognized as the "Soldiers' 
Friend." The bill to facilitate the granting of fur- 
loughs and discharges to disabled soldiers; the bill to 
facilitate the payment of bounties and arrears of pay 
due wounded and deceased soldiers; and bills granting 
pensions, and those making the application for them 
easy and inexpensive, were among the results of his pa- 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. ^©7 

triotic and thoughtful interest. He kept lonely vigils 
by the hospital cots at night, and by day was ceaseless- 
ly and tirelessly tramping from the War and Navy De- 
partments to the Executive Mansion. The New York 
Soldiers' Aid Society, in recognition of his eminent fit- 
ness and meritorious services, elected him its President, 
and the beneficent work of that Society is recorded 
in grateful hearts and registered by happy firesides all 
over our State. When, as Governor, he welcomed home 
the returning regiments of the disbanded army, the for- 
mal words of his ofificial proclamation spoke the senti- 
ments which had guided his actions. "Soldiers," said 
he, "your State thanks you and gives you pledge of 
her lasting gratitude. You have elevated her dignity, 
brightened her renown, and enriched her history. The 
people will regard with jealous pride your welfare and 
honor, not forgetting the widow, the fatherless, and 
those who were dependent upon the fallen hero." 

The Presidential canvass of 1864 was one of the most 
interesting in our history. The radical element in the 
Republican Party had nominated a ticket after denounc- 
ing President Lincoln because he was too slow and con- 
servative. Governor Horatio Seymour, while voicing 
the thought of the Democratic National Convention, 
in one of the most able and masterly of speeches, as its 
Chairman, had declared that Mr. Lincoln's administra- 
tion had been a series of costly and bloody mistakes, 
and under his guidance the war had been, and would 
continue to be, a failure. To carry New York Mr. Sey- 
mour accepted a renomination for Governor, and en- 
tered upon the canvass with his accustomed vigor and 
eloquence. Whether we differ from, or sustain, his po- 



2o8 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

litical opinions, we must all admit that Horatio Sey. 
mour was one of the most brilliant and attractive of our 
New York statesmen. The purity of his life, his unblem- 
ished character, his commanding presence, and his mag- 
netism upon the platform, made him the idol of his 
party and the most dangerous of opponents. It was 
vital to Mr. Lincoln and his administration, and to Mr. 
Seward, the Chief of his Cabinet, that New York should 
sustain them, and repel these charges. To meet this 
emergency, and conduct this campaign, Reuben E. Fen- 
ton was nominated by the Republican Convention for 
Governor. The wisdom of the choice was speedily ap- 
parent. Mr. Fenton's unequaled abilities as an organ- 
izer were felt in every school district in the common- 
wealth, and when the returns showed the State carried 
for Lincoln, and Fenton leading by some thousands the 
Presidential vote, the new Governor became a figure of 
national importance. Within four days after his inaug- 
uration he raised the last quota of troops called for from 
New York with this stirring appeal : "Having resolute- 
ly determined to go thus far in the struggle, we shall 
not falter nor hesitate when the rebellion reels under 
our heavy blows, when victory, upon all the methods of 
human calculation, is so near. Believing ourselves to be 
inspired by the same lofty sentiments of patriotism 
which animated our fathers in foundingour free institu- 
tions, let us continue to imitate their example of cour- 
age, endurance, and faithfulness to principle in main- 
taining them. Let us be faithful and persevere. Let 
there be a rally of the people in every city, village, and 
town. ' 

A few months afterward the happy lot and unique 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEIV. 209 

distinction came to him, following the surrender at 
Appomattox, of being among the immortals who will 
always live as the War Governors of our civil strife, 
who in Thanksgiving Proclamations returned to Al- 
mighty God the devout acknowledgments of a grate- 
ful people for the end of war and bloodshed, and the 
victory of unity and nationality. That he carried the 
State for his party at each recurring annual election 
during his two terms as Governor proves the popularity 
of his administration and his skill as an organizer. By 
temperament and training he was admirably fitted for 
executive position. No one ever understood better the 
peculiarities and surroundings of men. He was appar- 
ently the most amiable and conciliatory of public offi- 
cers, but never yielded an essential point. He pos- 
sessed in an eminent degree the rare faculty of satisfy- 
ing applicants and petitioners without gratifying them. 
The immense state and local indebtedness following the 
war, the wild speculations incident to an unstable cur- 
rency, and the perilous condition of public and private 
credit, he thoroughly understood, and with great sa- 
gacity and judgment devoted his powers to removing 
the dangers and preparing for the storm. He gave the 
State what it most needed after the drain and demoral- 
ization of the Civil War — a wise business government. 
So profoundly impressed with the strength of his ad- 
ministration was the Convention which met at Syra- 
cuse in 1868 to send delegates to the National Conven- 
tion at Chicago, that it unanimously and enthusiastically 
instructed the delegates to present his name for Vice- 
President, and for five ballots in that memorable con- 
test he was second on the poll. 



2IO ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

Senator Morgan realized, when it was too late to 
either gracefully retire or to avert defeat, that the power 
which Thurlow Weed had held for thirty years, and 
upon which he relied, had passed away, and the Gover- 
nor had become the master of the party forces in the 
State. Governor Fenton became easily the choice of 
the Legislature as Mr. Morgan's successor, and entered 
the Senate at a period when measures were pending 
which he thoroughly understood, and in their solution 
could render most valuable and enduring service. The 
bent of his mind was toward financial and business 
subjects, and the debt, taxation, the currency, banking, 
and revenue were the pressing problems of the hour. 
No measures since the adoption of the Constitution 
have had such permanent and beneficial influence upon 
the growth and prosperity of the country as the acts 
relating to finance from 1869 to 1875. The national 
credit was impaired, the interest upon the debt was ex- 
orbitant and threatened the gravest complications, and 
fiat money induced the wildest speculation, followed 
by its natural sequence, general bankruptcy and busi- 
ness suspension. With rare courage and wisdom Con- 
gress declared that all the obligations of the Govern- 
ment should be paid in gold. Instantly the shattered 
credit of the Republic was restored, and its securities 
advanced in all the markets of the world. Taking ad- 
vantage of this good name and reputation, bills were 
passed funding the debt at a rate of interest so much re- 
duced that a burden of over fifty millions of dollars a 
year was lifted from the taxpayers. Commerce, manu- 
factures, and all industries soon responded to this great 
relijf, and the stability and healthy expansion of tlic 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. 211 

vast business of the country were assured. But steady 
and reputable occupations, and the inauguration and 
completion of the enterprises which were in the years 
to come to develop our exhaustless resources in such 
a rapid and limitless way, were impossible with a fluc- 
tuating and uncertain currency. The full fruition of 
this grandest scheme of finance of modern times came 
with the resumption of specie payment. That the 
losses and destruction of the Civil War have been re- 
gained, repaired, and forgotten; that the Republic is 
many-fold richer in every element of wealth, prosper- 
ity, and promises for the future, is due to the wise 
foresight which prepared and perfected this harmo- 
nious and interdependent system. While Senator Fen- 
ton did his full share and occupied an honorable place 
in this grand and statesmanlike work, he originated 
and promoted with all his ability, thoroughness, and 
persistence, the abolition of the moiety methods of 
collecting the revenue. The evils had long been ap- 
parent, but no one had the boldness to attack them. 
They originated when the young Republic was too poor 
to pay adequate salaries, and continued until the enor- 
mous receipts at the customs gave to the revenue offi- 
cers a fortune each year, and retired them with large 
Avealth. They were intrenched in the cupidity of in- 
cumbents and the hopeful dreams of aspirants. Those 
in possession, and those who expected to be, in the ever 
varying tides of political fortunes, were alike hostile to 
a change. The system was fecund in spies, informers, 
and perjurers, and merchants were at the mercy of 
legalized blackmail. The final triumph of this benefi- 
cent reform will be remembered to his lasting honor. 



212 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 







No record of Governor Fenton's life would be com 
plcte which failed to give the facts of his separating 
from his party for one campaign, and no memorial hon- 
est which ignored its discussion. He supported the 
Republican candidates with all his might from the form- 
ation of the party till his death, with the single excep- 
tion of his vote for Mr. Greeley; before this event, 
bringing into the canvass all the forces of the organiza- 
tion then under his control, and after it, returning again 
within the regular lines, and giving his whole time and 
influence for the success in each succeeding canvass of 
Hayes, of Garfield, and of Blaine. No organization 
was either large enough or elastic enough to hold in 
harmonious relations and views two such opposite, orig- 
inal, and positive men as General Grant and Horace 
Greeley. All conditions in the beginning conspired to 
urge Greeley to independent action, as in the latter 
part of his canvass they united for his defeat. The rise 
of his tidal wave until a vast majority of the voters 
were apparently drawn into the current, and then its 
sudden collapse, followed immediately by his sleepless 
watching for weeks by the bedside of his dying wife, 
brain fever, delirium, and death, form one of the most 
dramatic episodes and romantic tragedies in American 
politics. Mr. Greeley delighted in polemical contro- 
versy, but he hated war. For more than a quarter of 
a century this strong thinker and master of the most 
vigorous English had furnished opinions to, and done 
the thinking for, vast masses of his fellow-citizens. In 
the anti-slavery movement, in the struggle for temper- 
ance legislation, in all moral reforms, he was the most 
potent factor of his generation. Shocked and outraged 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. 213 

beyond restraint when the first shot was fired at the 
flag, he demanded that the rebel soil be plowed with 
cannon-balls and sown with salt, and his clarion notes 
rang through the land like a trumpet blast calling all 
loyal men to arms. But when he thought he saw a 
prospect of peace with slavery abolished, he recoiled 
appalled from further bloodshed, and cried halt. 

Unlike most strong natures he harbored no resent- 
ments and was incapable of revenge. When the rebel- 
lion was crushed, he went upon the bail-bond of Jeffer- 
son Davis as a protest against death-penalties and con- 
fiscations, and in the hope of amnesty, reconciliation, 
and brotherly reunion upon the basis won by our vic- 
tory in the war. He so impressed and imbued Abra- 
ham Lincoln with his views that only the assassination 
of the President prevented their public announcement. 
He had been a devoted follower and passionate lover 
of Henry Clay, and three times had seen him set aside 
for the availability of military popularity. While most 
cordially conceding to General Grant his position as the 
foremost Captain of his time, Mr, Greeley mistrusted 
his administrative ability in civil affairs, feared the re- 
sult of his inexperience, and intensely disliked his ad- 
visers. To President Grant, on the other hand, the 
great editor seemed something more, and little less, 
than an inspired crank. After the unfortunate results 
of some of the temporary and tentative state adminis- 
trations in the South, Mr. Greeley conceived the idea 
that if the late rebels and slaveholders could be induced, 
in return for the full restoration of their state govern- 
ments and universal amnesty, to accept the amendments 
to the Constitution, the freedom and citizenship of th^ 



2 14 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

slave, the inviolability of the debt, and all the results of 
the war, with hearty loyalty to the flag waving over a 
Republic reconstructed on these conditions; and as 
hostage for their faith would take as their candidate for 
President a lifelong abolitionist and Republican ; the 
problem of reconstruction and peace would be solved 
at once. Responding to this idea the world beheld the 
amazing spectacle of these people in convention assem- 
bled solemnly declaring that the obligations of the Re- 
public to the abolition of slavery, to the civil and polit- 
ical rights of the freedmen, to the honest payment of 
the national debt, to the repudiation of rebel loans, and 
to pensions to Union soldiers, were unalterable and 
sacred, and then nominating for President one who had 
said more harsh and bitter things, and through his 
writings and speeches done more effective work for the 
overthrow of all their principles and traditions, than 
any man living or dead. That the South, without giv- 
ing the evidences of repentance then promised, has 
been granted and now enjoys even more than Mr. 
Greeley proposed is the answer of the succeeding po- 
litical generation to the fierce assaults made at the time 
upon his theory and anticipations. That a large majority 
of his party associates were converted to his hopeful 
view at first, and many followed him to the end, was 
natural, when the movement was inspired and led by 
so masterful and commanding an intellect, which had 
braved defeat and death for the rights of men, and been 
always the first of the forlorn hope of liberty and re- 
form, in the assault upon the almost impregnable posi- 
tions of wrong, immorality, and oppression for over a 
quarter of a century. That he was defeated and Gen- 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. 215 

eral Grant elected, the backward view over the events 
since 1872, which is not difificult for most men to safely 
and correctly take, proves to have been a wise and fortu- 
nate result. He was killed by his defeat. I stood near 
as the clouds began to gather in that mighty and ac- 
tive brain. He thought that a life unselfishly given to 
mankind would be judged a failure by posterity, and 
that the fame which he had hoped would rest upon the 
praise and the gratitude of the humble and oppressed, 
was already permanently injured by the prejudices and 
distrust aroused in them by the calumnies of the can- 
vass. Though his controversies filled the land, this 
great fighter for the truth as he understood it was the 
most morbidly sensitive of mortals, and, weakened by 
the sleepless strain of the struggle and domestic afflic- 
tion, his reason and life succumbed to ridicule and mis- 
representation. We have seen death in many forms, 
and for most of us it has lost its terrors, but to witness 
a great mind suddenly break and go out in helpless and 
hopeless darkness was the saddest scene I ever saw, and 
its memory is as of the most painful of tragedies. 

Horace Greeley was the last of that famous triumvir- 
ate of editors, Greeley, Bennett, and Raymond, whose 
genius and individuality subordinated the functions of 
a great newspaper to the presentation of their opinions 
and characteristics. Their journals were personal or- 
gans, but of phenomenal influence. The vigor of Mr. 
Greeley's thought, and the lucidity of its expression, 
carried conviction to the minds of hundreds of thousands 
of people, and he was for nearly a quarter of a century 
the greatest individual force in the country. He was 
so honest and terrifically in earnest, so right in his mo- 



2i6 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

tives and pure in his principles, that, like the spots upon 
the sun, his mistakes made more evident the loftiness 
of his purposes. His motives were so transparent that 
his errors and eccentricities increased his strength, and 
even when wrong he inspired more confidence than is 
reposed in most men when they are right. He made and 
unmade more reputations than any writer in the land. 
His untimely death hushed all hearts. President and 
Cabinet, generals and soldiers. Governors and Congress- 
men, friends and foes, the mighty and the humble, gath- 
ered at his bier, and the nation mourned as never before 
for the loss of a citizen in private station. 

Mr.Fenton had acted with Mr. Greeley since the form- 
ation of the Republican Party. They had been the 
closest of personal and political friends. They consulted 
freely and often on all questions, and continued in the 
fullest accord on party measures and policies. After 
the dissolution of the famous partnership of Seward, 
Weed, and Greeley, Fenton cast his fortunes with the 
junior member of the firm. His faith in Greeley, and 
constant contact with his aspirations and views, led to 
his full agreement with the opinions, while his fidelity 
led to his giving a cordial support to the ambitions, 
of his friend. 

After retiring from the Senate, Governor Fenton con- 
tinued active and deeply interested in the success of 
his party, but was never again a candidate for office. 
President Hayes sent him abroad in 1878 as Chairman 
of the Commission to the International Monetary Con- 
vention to fix the ratio of value between gold and sil- 
ver, and provide for their common use. But his health 
had become impaired by the strain of a busy and stormy 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. 217 

life, and continued precarious until his sudden death 
while sitting at his office desk. The Governor and state 
officers, and a great multitude of people representing 
the affection and respect of a large constituency, gave 
additional significance and solemnity to the last trib- 
utes to his memory. 

Reuben E. Fenton was remarkable for the full, 
rounded character of his mind and disposition. No 
matter how fiercely the storm raged about him, he was 
always serene and unmoved. Though it was his for- 
tunes which were at stake, he was the calmest of the 
combatants. He was the most affable and approach- 
able of men, and yet until he acted none knew either his 
plans or his views. He listened courteously to every- 
one, but what he heard rarely changed his deliberate 
judgment. In the heat of the contest, when upon his 
decision or signature depended results of the greatest 
importance to powerful and persistent applicants, his 
manner of receiving them led to angry charges that he 
had conveyed false impressions or been guilty of bad 
faith, but no proof was ever submitted, and it came to 
be admitted that he was simply under the most tantal- 
izing and exasperating conditions always a gentleman. 
He was faultless in dress and manners, whether in the 
executive chamber, upon the platform, or in the crowd, 
but this scrupulous exactness seemed to enhance his 
popularity. He loved to mingle freely with the people, 
but he received the like kindly greeting and cordial con- 
fidence from workingmen fresh from the forge or mer- 
chants in their parlors or counting-rooms. When the 
history of our State comes to be impartially written, 
Mr. Fenton will be given rank as its best political organ. 



2l8 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

izer after Martin Van Buren. But he possessed a mag- 
netism which Van Buren never had. A most tender, 
gentle, and affectionate nature shone brightly for his 
friends through the crust of the mannerisms of ofifice 
and policy. I have met all the public men of my time 
under circumstances sufificiently close to afford some 
insight into the secrets of their power, and he was 
one of the very few who had an eloquent presence. 
His touch and look conveyed, if he pleased, such a 
world of interest and regard, that the recipient, without 
knowing why, felt honored by his confidence and en- 
circled by his friendship. It was this which made it 
impossible to crush him after repeated defeats. When 
he was under the ban of power; when to act with him 
was to accept ostracism ; when the ofifice-holder was 
sure to lose his place and the ambitious found all ave- 
nues barred if they followed his lead ; he came year 
after year to the annual Convention of his party with 
such a solid, numerous, and aggressive host that it re- 
quired all the resources of unsurpassed eloquence, polit- 
ical sagacity, and the lavish prizes of patronage to pre- 
vent his carrying off the victory. The character and 
deeds which redound to his honor and will perpetuate 
his memory are sources of just pride to his State and 
of lasting pleasure to his friends. He was a representa- 
tive of the people when the most vital questions affect- 
ing the welfare of the human race on this continent 
were at issue and the Republic in the agonies of disso- 
lution, and acted well the part of philanthropist, patriot, 
and statesman. He was twice Governor of this State 
at a most critical period in its history, wielding the 
powers of the Executive with wisdom and courage; 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. iig 

and as the leader of the dominant party in the com- 
monwealth, exercising a potent, but broad and health- 
ful, influence in the affairs of the nation. He was United 
States Senator during the fruitful period of the recon- 
struction of the Government, and left enduring monu- 
ments of his fidelity and ability as one of the architects 
of the new era. As Congressman, Governor, Senator, 
there is no stain upon his record, and his public life 
stands pure and unassailed. 

The controversies which occupied so large a part of 
his life are over; the causes which produced them have 
ceased to exist ; and the friends and foes of that period 
can fight over the old battles without rancor or passion. 
The ever dissolving and reuniting fragments of political 
forces wear off by friction enmities and jealousies, and 
by the recognition of merits before unknown in our op- 
ponents we are all brought into more harmonious and 
respecting relations. We can all stand beside the grave 
of Reuben E. Fenton, and forgetting, for the moment, 
our divisions and contentions, mourn the loss of one 
who in his day and generation acted so well his part as 
private citizen and public officer, that the common- 
wealth and the country were enriched by his example, 
his character, and his work. 



no ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 



XV. 

ADDRESS AT THE UnVEILING OF THE StATUE OF 
Alexander Hamilton, in Central Park, New 
York, November 22, 1880. 



Fellow-Citizens : 

The cosmopolitan spirit of our city is attested by 
the monuments erected in this park by the pride and 
patriotism of other nationalities and States to commem- 
orate the men whose genius and works belong to them, 
but are equally honored by us. The time has long 
since passed, when to this glorious group should have 
been added the statue of New York's greatest gift to 
the Revolutionary period and the constitutional his- 
tory of the Republic. The filial piety of a son performs 
the work, and we are here to honor the deed, and vener- 
ate the memory of his distinguished father. 

Precocious intellects in all ages of the world have 
flashed with meteoric splendor, and for a brief space 
amazed mankind; but he only whose full-equipped 
mind knew no youth and never failed in the full maturi- 
ty of its powers was Alexander Hamilton. At twelve 
years of age, a merchant's clerk, he writes : "I would 
willingly risk my life, though not my character, to ex- 
alt my station." At thirteen he was the responsible 
head of a great commercial establishment, controlling 
tile details of the counting-room, managing its ventures 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. 221 

with distant countries, and maintaining its credit. At 
fifteen, he stands before the venerable President of 
Princeton College, with the bold proposition to be per- 
mitted to ascend through the classes as he mastered 
their courses, and to be graduated without regard to 
the years alloted by the rules, when he could pass an 
examination. The conservatism of. Princeton rejects, 
and Columbia, then King's College, accepts the youth- 
ful student upon his own terms. With rare industry 
and application, with method and wisdom, he seeks 
every source of knowledge and rapidly absorbs and 
assimilates all the teachings of the schools. 

But while he meditates in the groves of the Academy, 
the thunders of the mighty revolution which was shak- 
ing the continent disturb the quiet of the lecture-room. 
The protracted struggle of the colonists with the 
Mother Country for peaceful recognition of their rights 
was approaching a crisis. The tea had been thrown 
into Boston Harbor, and the retaliatory measures of the 
Home Government impressed upon the colonies the 
necessity of all uniting in the common defense. A 
great meeting was called in the Fields by the patriots 
of this city. When the orators had closed their passion- 
1 ate appeals, a slender lad of seventeen ascended the 
platform. Curiosity soon gave place to admiration, and 
admiration to amazement and enthusiastic applause, as 
the boy proceeded. Calmly and clearly, with resistless 
reason and vivid imagery, he portrayed the origin of 
the difificulties. the rights guaranteed by their charters, 
by Magna Charta and the English Constitution, but 
above all the inalienable liberties of every people, and 
showed the possibilities of successful resistance by 



222 



ORATIOiYS AND SPEECHES OF 



united effort. New York decided to send delegates to 
the Continental Congress, and Hamilton began that 
structure of American nationality, of which he ^as 
the main architect, and to whose perfection and per- 
petuity he devoted his life. 

A resort to arms had not yet closed the forum, and 
to the discussion came the best trained, the ablest, the 
most eloquent men of New York, pleading the cause of 
England in pamphlets remarkable for their power, and 
which stayed the course and shook the judgment of the 
people. But the replies were so brilliant and over- 
whelming that they consolidated public sentiment for 
the cause of the people, and were ascribed to the fore- 
most statesman of the period ; and upon the discovery 
of their author, Hamilton, at eighteen, was hailed by 
the whole country as the peer of the Adamses and of 
Jay. But when the multitude, smarting under wron-s 
and fired by the eloquence of their champion, sought 
riotous vengeance upon their enemies, he stayed the 
angry mob while the President of his college escaped 
and offered to lead in defense of property and the maj^ 
esty of the law. Popular passion never swayed his 
judgment; personal ambition, or the applause of the 
hour, never moved or deterred him. The same intui- 
.ve insight and foresight, which worked out for him 
h.s own course and position, recognized and protected 
l>c rights o his bitterest foes. Concord and Lexing- 
ton closed the argument. 

He saw the necessity and riglnfulness of armed resist- 

o c con.bata„,s and the nature of the country, pre- 
d.acd ,ts success. While others fought for terms he 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. 223 

from the beginning fought for independence. With 
the remnant of his httle fortune he equipped a com- 
pany, and the Board of Examining Officers, in admira- 
tion of his proiiciencyin the science of war, commis- 
sioned the stripHng a Captain of Artillery, and compli- 
mented the discipline of his command. In an anony- 
mous letter which he wrote to Washington he pointed 
out the dangers of the position on Long Island, and 
the warning was justified by the disastrous battle 
and retreat. His coolness and intrepidity at Harlem 
Heights attracted the notice and comment of the Com- 
mander-in-Chief, and his skill and bravery at White 
Plains stayed the onset of the veteran and victorious 
Hessians. In an age when commissions in the army were 
only secured by noble birth or by purchase, he struck 
the keynote of the inspiration of a volunteer force, by 
recommending promotion from the ranks with such 
vigor that his advice was adopted by Congress. Dur- 
ing the gloomy retreat through New Jersey, a veteran 
officer noticed a company "which was a model of dis- 
cipline : its Captain a merfe boy, with small, slender, and 
delicate frame, who, with cocked hat pulled down over 
his eyes, and apparently lost in thought, marched be- 
side a cannon, patting it every now and then as if it 
were a favorite horse or pet plaything," and was sur- 
prised when told it was the famous Hamilton. But the 
young officer held the British at bay while the Ameri- 
can army crossed the Raritan, and at Princeton and 
Trenton his company won renown and left upon the 
field three-fourths of their number. 

From the line, with its opportunities for distinction 
and promotion, the necessities of the Commander-in- 



224 ORATIOXS AND SPEECHES OF 

Chief drafted Hamilton into his military family, and at 
twenty he became the confidential aide of Washington. 
How fortunate and providential was this conjunction! 
The reverence of the secretary for the majestic charac- 
ter, lofty patriotism, and full, rounded judgment of his 
chief, was reciprocated by the confidence and admira- 
tion of the chief for the genius, thoroughness, readi- 
nes, comprehensive knowledge, intuitive perception, 
and purity of his secretary. The one began, the other 
instantly grasped the conclusion. The brief statement 
of the one became the convincing argument of the 
other. The suggestive hint of the evening was pre- 
sented for signature as the completed and unanswer- 
able argument of the morning. Washington pointed 
the way, and Hamilton cleared and paved the broad 
road upon which Congress, or the army, or the hesitat- 
ing State, must travel. The responsibilities of the con- 
tinent, in field and cabinet, rested upon Washington ; 
but Hamilton grasped, assimilated, codified principles, 
and simplified details, so that in the vast and compli- 
cated system nothing was neglected or forgotten, and 
the friendship cemented and strengthened with years 
ended only in death. It was a fitting and picturesque 
close of the Revolutionary War that, when the combi- 
nations of Washington had hemmed in Cornwallis at 
Yorktown, Hamilton should lead the forlorn hope in 
the storming of the British redoubt, and, firing his sol- 
diers to the charge by the memory of the massacre of 
their comrades at New London, in the heat and passion 
of victory grant mercy to the vanquished. 

Independence left the Republic with but the shadow 
of a government. Congress possessed only advisory 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. 225 

powers, and, in its inability to enforce its decrees upon 
the States, became an object of contempt at home and 
ridicule abroad. It was then that Hamilton brought 
forth his exhaustless resources to consolidate a nation. 
The first Convention proved a failure, but its address 
to the country, prepared by him, aroused the fears 
and stirred the patriotism of the people. The second 
Convention, presided over by Washington, numbered 
among its members the ablest men of the infant Repub- 
lic. Hamilton presented for their deliberations a system 
complete in all its parts. He had seen the war for in- 
dependence prolonged, and at times almost lost, by the 
failure of centralized authority and the jealousies of the 
States, and he proposed that the great empire, whose 
future was as clear to his vision as its reality is to ours, 
should recognize the federative principle in home and 
local affairs ; but be clothed with powers to preserve 
the union of the States and command the respect of the 
world. State sovereignty assailed the proposition in 
every part, but out of the discussion was saved the Con- 
stitution which has survived the storms of a century. 
Its preamble, written by him, "We, the People of the 
United States," was the foundation of his policy. An 
overwhelming majority of the New York Convention, 
led by her War Governor, George Clinton, opposed its 
ratification ; but Hamilton, by resistless logic, impas- 
sioned eloquence, and lofty appeals to the pride and 
patriotism of its members, silenced opposition, quieted 
prejudices, and won the assent of our State to the great 
compact ; and, with rapturous applause, with proces- 
sions and addresses, the people, whom he had educated 
by The Federalist, the press, and his speeches, to a de- 



226 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

sire for a common country, hailed him as the savior of 
the nation. Hamilton forged the links and welded the 
chain which binds the Union. He saw the dangers of 
secession, and pointed out the remedy against it in the 
implied powers of the Constitution. When Pennsyl- 
vania rebelled against the Excise Law, he said : "Let 
there be no temporizing, but crush the insurrection 
with such overwhelming force and display of power that 
it will never be repeated." Upon the foundation laid 
by Hamilton, Webster built his majestic structure of 
constitutional law, and the principles so established 
silenced nullification, vindicated the right of the Repub- 
lic to protect its life by arms, and reconstructed the 
States. 

This young soldier, whose life had passed in camps, 
dropped the practice of law at the moment when emi- 
nence and wealth were in his grasp, to obey the call of 
Washington, and at thirty-two became the first Secre- 
tary of the Treasury. The Republic was bankrupt and 
without credit, commerce was destroyed, trade para- 
lyzed, agricuhure neglected, and public distress and pri- 
vate poverty were the attendants of despair. He so 
constructed the Treasury Department that it has need- 
ed hut little revision during ninety years. He created 
a system of finance which restored credit and sent the 
life-blood throbbing through every artery of the body 
politic. The demagogue cried : "Pay the obligation of 
the Government at the nominal price for which it was 
buffeted in the market," and the misery of the* unthink- 
ing echoed the cry; but this statesman said : "Let the 
letter and the spirit of the bond be met," and prosper- 
ity trod upon the heels of honestv. 1 le alone knew the 



CHA UNCE V M. DEPE IW 227 

secrets whose publicity enriched multitudes, and yet he 
retired from office to earn a living. Upon the bound- 
less sea of experiment without chart or compass, he in- 
vented both. He smote the sources of revenue with 
such skill and power, that from the barren rocks flowed 
the streams which filled the Treasury and the Sinking 
Fund, and the exhausted land was fertilized by its own 
productiveness. 

Out of chaos he developed perfected schemes which 
have stood every strain and met every emergency in 
our national life. From his tent at Morristown he sug- 
gested to the bewildered Morris, who was seeking funds 
to sustain the Revolution, a plan of a National Banking 
system which he completed as Secretary of the Treas- 
ury, and which, after many vicissitudes and with some 
modifications, has met the exigencies created by civil 
war, and is the basis upon which rests our whole struct- 
ure of public and private business. He saw the neces- 
sity for manufactures, and the possibility of their crea- 
tion and growth by judicious protection, and laid down 
the principles which succeeding statesmen and public- 
ists have accepted, but never enlarged. When the or- 
gies of the French Revolution maddened Europe and 
intoxicated America, and in the name of universal Re- 
publicanism France demanded an offensive and defen- 
sive alliance, he stemmed the popular current, prophe- 
sied that license would end in despotism, and estab- 
lished the great rule of neutrality which has been the 
guiding and protecting spirit of our foreign policy. 

Having spent his patrimony in the war, the care of 
his family called for his best exertions. So great was 
the concentration of his industry and the comprehen- 



228 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

siveness of his mind, that in three months he mastered 
the law, and entered at once upon a lucrative practice. 
So great was his public spirit that he abandoned it to 
perfect the Federal Constitution, resumed, and again 
left it to secure the ratification of that instrument, closed 
his books a third time when summoned by Washington 
into his Cabinet, and locked his office for a fourth time 
to organize an army to resist threatened war and inva- 
sion of the country. 

Amidst the universal prosperity created by his wis- 
dom and measures, private needs compelled his resigna- 
tion, and he entered upon the brief, but most brilliant, 
professional career in the illustrious history of the bar 
of our State. With all-embracing genius, the most 
plodding lawyer was never better fortified with case 
and precedent. With tireless energy he traced princi- 
ples back to their sources and forward to their conclu- 
sions. Enraptured juries were swayed by his eloquence, 
and admiring judges convinced by his arguments. He 
so settled the law of libel and the liberty of the press, 
that his brief became part of the constitutions of States 
and the statutes of England. The accused, who was too 
poor to retain and too humble to arouse the ambition 
of a lawyer, found both advocate and acquittal in 
Hamilton. The needy client, whose little patrimony 
and family he had saved, could pay no fee but grateful 
tears. That he was human and committed errors is the 
background which brings out in bolder relief the sim- 
plicity and integrity of his character and the greatness 
of his mind. Talleyrand, walking up Garden Street in 
this city late at night, and seeing him at work in his 
office, said: "I have seen one of the wonders of the 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. 229 

world. I have seen a man laboring all night to support 
his family, who has made the fortune of a nation." This 
great critic and cynic said : "I consider Napoleon, Fox, 
and Hamilton the three greatest men of our epoch, and 
without hesitation I award the first place to Hamilton." 
To the objection that the others had dealt with greater 
masses and larger interests in Europe, Talleyrand re- 
plied : "But Hamilton divined Europe." 

The period was rich in precocious intellects, but 
Hamilton's superiority was in strength of thought and 
vigor of expression, in the consistency and honesty of 
his convictions, the unselfishness of his purposes, and his 
marvelous versatility. He brushed aside prejudice and 
preconceived opinions, and from impregnable founda- 
tions his reasonings had the strength of inspiration and 
the spirit of prophecy. He dwelt upon the problem 
of internal commerce, and suggested the Erie Canal. 
He thought out a standing army, and founded West 
Point. He saw the necessity of popular education and 
the plain duty of the State, and perfected that grand 
and comprehensive system, free from sectarian control 
or influence, which is the pride of New York and has 
been a model of reform in foreign countries. The 
glory of our time is the emancipation of the slave, and 
yet he advised the arming and freeing of the blacks in 
the Revolutionary War as a measure of wisdom and 
philanthropy. When informed of the death of Wash- 
ington, he burst into tears and fell into the arms of a 
friend, crying: "The Republic has lost its savior and 
I a father." His last message was: "For God's sake, 
cease conversations and threatenings about a separation 
of the Union." His dying words were of forgiveness 



230 OKA rWAS AND SPEECHES OF 

to his murderer and his enemies, and of a confident 
trust in salvation through the mercy of the Redeemer. 
The Republic, recovering from grief at the loss of 
Washington by the reflection that Hamilton lived in 
the meridian of his powers, was plunged into universal 
sorrow by his untimely end. But the fears which agi- 
tated that generation, lest the dissolution of the Union 
might follow the death of this great bulwark of nation- 
ality, have blended, in our time, into gratitude and 
reverence for the founder of the Constitution. 



CHAUNCEV M DEPEW. 231 







XVI. 

RATION AT THE CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION OF 

THE Capture of Major Andre, at Tarry- 
town, N. Y., September 23, 1880. 



One hundred years ago the sun rose upon the same 
beautiful landscape which surrounds us here to-day. 
The noble Hudson rolled in front; to the north were 
the Highlands, in their majesty and strength; on the 
west towered the mountains enclosing the bay, and on 
the east spread valleys and hills celebrated then, as 
now, for their picturesqueness and commanding views. 
Beyond the loveliness of the situation it had no greater 
claims upon the attention of the world than hundreds 
of places adorned by nature which have made our State 
celebrated for the beauty and variety of its scenery ; 
but when the sun went down this spot had become one 
of the fields priceless in the memory of mankind, where 
virtue is vindicated, and civilization and liberty saved 
from great disaster. The story we repeat here has 
equal value as a lesson to the living and a reverent 
tribute to the memory of the dead 

History, traditions, legends forgotten, almost lost, in 
the rapid march of events and the wonderful develop- 
ment of material prosperity, are so revived by these 
commemorations that our county, richer than any other 



232 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

in the commonwealth in Revolutionary recollections, 
becomes in every part a perpetual teacher of the labors 
and sacrifices of patriotism to secure our independence. 

The happiness and progress of mankind have as often 
been advanced or retarded by small events as by great 
battles. If the three hundred men with Leonidas 
stemmed the Persian torrent, and made Thermopylae 
the inspiration of twenty centuries, right here a cent- 
ury ago to-day three plain farmers of Westchester pre- 
served the liberties of the American people. 

It is hard', even in imagination, to understand now 
the condition of this region at that period. It was 
ominously known as the neutral ground, and marauded 
and harried by Royal and Continental soldiers, and by 
Skinners and Cowboys, robbers and brigands of equal 
infamy. The Whig farmer saw his cattle driven off 
and the flames of his buildings lighting the sky to-night, 
and mercilessly retaliated upon his Tory neighbor to- 
morrow. Fences were down, fruif rotted ungathered 
on the ground, rank vegetation covered the unsown 
fields, and the gaunt and vengeful citizen guarded with 
ready musket his family and hidden stores, or watched 
in ambuscade by the wayside to recapture his stolen 
property or prevent the delivery of foraged stores to 
the enemy. Amidst such experiences and surround- 
ings the captors of Andr^ passed their daily lives. 

September, 1780, was a gloomy and anxious time for 
Washington and Congress. Charleston had fallen, and 
Gates had been disastrously defeated. With the rout 
of his army the whole South had come under the ene- 
my's control. New Jersey was overrun, and twenty 
thousand men, veterans of European battle-fields, were 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. 



233 



gathered in New York. The French fleet had sailed 
away, and a large reinforcement arrived to the British 
navy, and Washington's cherished plan of a demonstra- 
tion against the city had to be abandoned. The only 
American force worthy the name of an army, num.ber- 
ing less than twelve thousand, suffering from long ar- 
rears of pay, without money to send their starving fami- 
lies, and short of every kind of supplies, was encamped 
at and about West Point. This critical moment was 
selected by Arnold, with devihsh sagacity, to strike his 
deadly blow. Elated by the success which had crowned 
his earlier efforts, he plunged into excesses which left 
him without a command, bankrupt in fortune, and 
smarting under the reprimand of Congress. He still 
retained the confidence of Washington, and anxious to 
secure the largest price for his treason, applied for and 
obtained the command of West Point. The surrender 
of this post, controlling the passes of the Hudson, 
with its war materials vital to the maintenance of the 
patriot army, and its garrison of four thousand troops, 
together with the person of Washington, ended, in his 
judgment, the war, and gave him a place second to 
Monk in English history. 

The success or failure of the united colonies in form- 
ing an independent government depended, from the 
beginning to the end of the contest, on the State of 
New York. Through her boundaries ran the natural 
channels by which the Six Nations marched to savage 
empire ; the English broke the French power on this 
continent, and emigration and commerce have peopled 
and enriched great States. A British statesman and 
soldier said : "Fortify from Canada to the city of New 



234 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

York, and we can hold the colonies together." The 
British Cabinet and generals said : "Capture and place 
a chain of posts along the route from New York city 
to Canada, and we can crush rebellious New England 
and awe all the rest into submission." The battle of 
Saratoga and surrender of Burgoyne defeated the last 
and most formidable attempt to accomplish this result 
by arms. Upon its bloody field American indepen- 
dence was consummated. That grand victory, which 
gave us unity at home and recognition abroad, was 
largely due to the skill, the dash, the intrepid valor of 
Arnold. 

The issue decided in that conflict the control of the 
passes of the Hudson, and all which would follow was 
now to be reopened and reversed by treason — and the 
traitor the same Arnold. For eighteen months a cor- 
respondence opened by Arnold had been carried on be- 
tween him and Major Andre, acting for Sir Henry Clin- 
ton. He wrote over the signature of Gustavus, seeking 
a bid for his defection, and occasionally imparting valu- 
able information to indicate his importance. Andre re- 
plied under the name of John Anderson, testing and 
tempting. These letters, molded in the vocabulary 
of trade, and treating of the barter and sale of cattle 
and goods, were really haggling about the price of the 
betrayal of the liberties of America and a human soul. 
The time had come for action, and the British must 
be satisfied as to the identity of their man and the firm- 
ness of his purpose, and commit him beyond the possi- 
bility of retreat. For, said Sir Henry Clinton, "We 
propose to risk no lives upon the possibilities of deceit 
or failure." The first meeting appointed at Dobbs' 



tHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. 235 

Ferry, on the 12th of September, failed, and Arnold 
came near being captured. With rare audacity he re- 
ported his visit at once to Washington, and the next 
day wrote a letter to General Greene expressing bitter 
indignation against Gates for his Southern defeat, and 
the apprehension that it would leave an indelible stain 
upon his reputation. 

Arm.ed with a decoy letter from Beverly Robinson, 
ostensibly about his confiscated lands, really conveying 
information where an interview with Andre might be 
had, he met Washington, on his way to see Rocham- 
beau at Hartford, carried him across the river at Ver- 
planck's Point in his barge, and asked permission to go, 
but the chief declined, saying the matter had better be 
left to the civil authorities. An overruling Providence 
was protecting the patriot cause and weaving about the 
plot the elements of its exposure and destruction. 
Baffled, but not disheartened, Arnold, lurking in the 
bushes of the Long Clove below Haverstraw, sent a 
boat at midnight to the Vulture to bring Andre to the 
shore. The boatmen, roughly handled on the sloop of 
war for daring to approach her without a flag of truce, 
are hurried before Andre and explain their mission. 
He disguised his uniform in a cloak and determined to 
accompany them. The caution of Sir Henry Clinton 
not to go within the American lines, not to cover his 
uniform, not to be the bearer of any papers, rings in his 
ears. The warning hand of Beverly Robinson rests 
upon his shoulder. The danger, the disgrace, the prize, 
are before him. If detected, a spy ; if successful, at the 
head of a victorious column upon Fort Putnam receiv- 
ing the surrender of West Point ; a General's commis- 



23^ ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

sion ; the thanks of Parh'ament ; the knightly honors of 
his King. Brilliant, accomplished, captivating, chival- 
ric, and ambitious, his secret correspondence had re- 
vealed the defect in his character; his moral sense was 
paralyzed in the presence of great opportunities. 

The dawn finds Arnold and Andre still in the thicket, 
still disputing about the terms. Horses are hastily 
mounted, and they start for Smith's House, still stand- 
ing yonder above the bay. The sentinel's challenge, 
the countersign, warn Andre that he is in the last posi- 
tion of a soldier: disguised and on a secret mission 
within the enemy's camp. All the morning that fearful 
bargaining goes on, and at last it is settled. He receives 
the papers giving the plans, fortifications, armament, 
and troops at West Point, the proceedings of Wash- 
ington's last council of war, and hides them between 
his stockings and his feet. He receives the assurance 
that the defenses shall be so manned as to fall without 
a blow, and assures Arnold in return of a brigadier-gen- 
eralship in the British army, and seven thousand pounds 
in money, and bids him farewell, till he meets him at 
the close of a sham combat to receive his surrender and 
sword. 

Those two men thus bidding adieu on yonder hillside 
have determined the destinies of unborn millions, and 
none share their secret, and there is no one to betray 
them. Once safely back with those papers, and Ameri- 
ca's doom is sealed. We bow with devout and humble 
thanksgiving to the watchful and beneficent Providence 
which turned most trivial circumstances into the power- 
ful elements that thwarted this well-laid scheme. Col- 
onel Livingston, commanding at Verplanck's, refused by 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. ^31 

Arnold a heavy gun to fire upon the Vulture, had made 
it so hot for her with a Httle four-pounder on Teller's 
Point, that she had dropped down the river. The timid 
Smith, of whom posterity is in doubt whether he was a 
knave or a tool, was too scared to venture to reach her 
by boat, and so the land journey was determined upon. 
Still further disguised, and armed with Arnold's pass in 
the name of John Anderson, Andre crossed the river 
on the afternoon of the 22d of September to Verplanck's 
Point, and safely passed through Livingston's camp. 
Gayly he rides, accompanied by Smith, through the 
Cortlandt woods, and over the Yorktown hills. He 
laughs as he passes the ancient guide-post, bearing its 
legend, "Dishe his di Roode toe de Kshing's Farray"; 
and his hair stood on end, he said, when he met Colonel 
Webb, of our army, whom he perfectly knew, but who 
stared and went on. His plan is to strike the White 
Plains road and so reach his own lines. But at Crum- 
pond, Captain Boyd stops them. A most uncomfort- 
able, inquisitive, vigilant, and troublesome Yankee, is 
this same Captain Boyd. Arnold's pass stuns him, but 
it requires all the versatility and adroitness of Andre to 
allay his suspicions. He so significantly recommends 
their remaining all night that they dare not decline. A 
Westchester farmer's bed never had two more uneasy 
occupants. At early dawn they departed, with Captain 
Boyd in the rear, and the Cowboys, against whom Boyd 
had warned them, in front ; Andre's spirits rose. He 
had left disgrace and a shameful death behind, and saw 
only escape, glory, and renown before. Hitherto taci- 
turn and depressed, he now overwhelmed his dazed 
companion with a flood of brilliant talk. Poetry, music, 



238 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

belles-lettres, the drama, the times, formed the theme of 
his flowing eloquence, and ever and anon as they ascend- 
ed the many eminences which command a view of the 
Highlands and the river, he broke out in rapturous 
praise of the entrancing scenery. Mrs. Underhill, near 
Pine's Bridge, had lost her all, but one cow and a bag 
of meal, by a raid of the Cowboys the night before, but 
with true county hospitality she spread before them the 
time-honored Westchester dish of suppawn and milk. 
At Pine's Bridge, Smith's courage failed and he bade 
his companion good-by. This was another of the triv- 
ial incidents which led Andre to his fate. Smith, with 
his acquaintance and ready wit, would have piloted 
him safely by the White Plains road, or upon the other 
route, and satisfied the scruples of the yeomen who cap- 
tured him. Smith rode to West Point and by his re- 
port allayed Arnold's anxiety, and then in the easy and 
shiftless character of everybody's friend, he continued 
on to Fishkill and supped with Washington and his 
staff. Andre alone, free from care, decided to strike 
for the river: it was a shorter road, and from the Cow- 
boys who infested it he had nothing to fear; but it was 
another link in the chain winding around him. The 
broad domains of his friends, the great loyalist families, 
lay about him, his own lines a few short hours beyond. 
Saturday morning, the 23d of September, one hun- 
dred years ago, was one of those clear, bright, exhilarat- 
ing days, when this region is in the fullness of its quiet 
beauty. The handsome horseman delights the children 
of Staats Hammond's family as they hand him a cup 
of water, and leaves a lasting impression upon the Qua- 
kers of Chappacjua, of whom he inquires the distance to 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. 239 

Tarrytown. Through Sparta, he strikes the river road, 
and gallops along that most picturesque highway, the 
scenery in harmony with the brilliant future spread be- 
fore his imagination. He recognizes the old Sleepy 
Hollow Church, with its ancient bell bearing the motto, 
Si Dens pro nobis, qtiis contra nos, and a half-mile in 
front sees the bridge over the little brook which was to 
be for him a fatal Rubicon. On the south side of that 
stream, in the bushes playing cards, were three young 
farmers of the neighborhood — John Paulding, David 
Williams, and Isaac Van Wart — watching to intercept 
the Cowboys and their stolen cattle. At the approach 
of the horseman, Paulding steps into the road, presents 
his musket, and calls a halt. It was nine in the morn- 
ing; they have been there but an hour. An earlier 
start, a swifter pace, and Andre would have escaped ; 
but this was still another of the trivial incidents in 
the fatal combination about him. Andre speaks first. 
"My lads, I hope you belong to our party." "Which 
party?" they said. "The lower party," he answered. 
"We do." "Then, thank God !" said he, "I am once 
more among friends. I am a British officer, out on 
particular business, and must not be detained a min- 
ute." Then they said : "We are Americans, and you 
are our prisoner and must dismount." "My God!" he 
said laughing, "a man must do anything to get along," 
and presented Arnold's pass. Had he presented it first, 
Paulding said afterward, he would have let him go. 
They carefully scanned it, but persisted in detaining 
him. He threatened them with Arnold's vengeance 
for this disrespect to his order; but, in language more 
forcible than polite, they told him "they cared not for 



S46 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

that,*' and led him to the great whitewood tree, under 
which he was searched. As the fatal papers fell from 
his feet, Paulding said: "My God, here it is!" and, as 
he read them, shouted in high excitement to his com- 
panions, "By God, he is a spy!" 

Now came the crucial and critical moment. Andre, 
fully alive to his danger, and with every faculty alert, 
felt no alarm. He had the day before bargained with 
and successfully bought an American major-general of 
the highest military reputation. If a few thousand 
pounds and a commission in the British army could se- 
duce the commander of a district, surely escape was easy 
from these three young men, but one of whom could 
read, and who were buttressed by neither fame nor for- 
tune. "If you will release me," said Andre, "I will give 
you a hundred guineas and any amount of dry goods." 
"I will give you a thousand guineas," he cried, "and 
you can hold me hostage till one of your number re- 
turns with the money." Then Paulding swore, "We 
would not let you go for ten thousand guineas." That 
decision saved the liberties of America. It voiced the 
spirit which sustained and carried through the Revolu- 
tionary struggle for nationality, and crushed the rebel- 
lion waged eighty years afterward to destroy that na- 
tionality — the invincible courage and impregnable vir- 
tue of the common people. 

As Washington was riding that night from Hartford, 
depressed by the refusal of Count Rochambeau, the 
French General, to co-operate in his plans, and to be 
overwhelmed on the morrow by Arnold's astounding 
treason, all along the route enthusiastic throngs with 
torches and acclamations hailed his approach. "We 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEIV. 24t 

may be beaten by the English," he said to Rocham- 
beau's aide, "it is the fortune of war; but behold an 
army which they can never conquer." 

With one of his captors in front, the others on either 
side of his horse, Andre is carried to Colonel Jame- 
son's, the nearest American post. The gay horseman 
has come to grief, and the buoyant gallop to the front 
has turned into a funeral march to the rear, and he re- 
calls the ill omen of the song sung by Wolfe the night 
before the storming of Quebec, and which he had re- 
peated at the farewell dinner given him the evening of 
his departure on this fatal errand : 

Why, soldiers, why, 

Should we be melancholy, boys, 

Why, soldiers, why. 

Whose business 'tis to die. 

Jameson, a brave and honest soldier, was easily duped 
by the courtly arts of Andre. While he sent the pa- 
pers by special messenger to Washington, he was per- 
suaded by Andre to forward him, with a letter descrip- 
tive of his capture, to Arnold. Once there, and both 
had escaped. The vigilant and suspicious Major Tall- 
madge induced Jameson to bring back Andr^ ; but to 
recall the letter to Arnold he positively refused. Jame- 
son's messenger to Washington, mistaking his road, did 
not reach West Point till the next noon ; his messen- 
ger to Arnold arrived in the morning. 

Washington, on approaching the river, according to 
his habit, proceeded at once to examine the fortifica- 
tions. Lafayette reminded him that Mrs. Arnold's 
breakfast v/as waiting. "You young gentlemen arc all 



242 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

in love with Mrs. Arnold," he said. "You go and tell 
her not to wait for me, I will be there in a short time." 
Hamilton and McHenry delivered the message, and 
were welcomed by Arnold and his wife. In the midst 
of the meal Allan, the messenger, delivered Jameson's 
letter. Arnold's iron nerve held him unconcernedly 
at the table a few moments; then, saying he must go 
over to the Point to prepare for the reception of the 
General, he arose. His wife followed him upstairs. 
Hastily informing her of his ruin, and bidding her per- 
haps a last farewell, as she fell fainting to the floor, he 
kissed his sleeping baby, stepped a moment into the 
breakfast-room to inform his guests of the sudden ill- 
ness of his wife, and, followed by his boat's crew, dashed 
down the hillside to the river. They must row with 
all their might, he told them, as he had a message to 
deliver on board the Vulture, eighteen miles below, for 
Washington, and should be back before evening. He 
reprimed his pistols, and, with one in each hand, sat re- 
solved to die the death of a suicide rather than be cap- 
tured. By promises of reward, by voice and gesture, 
he urges his crew to their best exertions. His guilty 
soul peopling every turn of the river with avenging 
pursuit, he sails through the Highlands, waving his 
handkerchief as a flag to his forts, redoubts, and patrols, 
astonishing the vigilant Livingston at Verplanck's with 
the spectacle of his commander making straight for the 
Ikitish sloop of war, and takes the first free breath of 
rc-licf as he steps on the deck of the Vulture. 

To his coxswain he ofi"ers a commission, to the crew 
rewards, if they will desert and join the British. They 
unanimously refuse, and T.arvcy, the coxswain, replies: 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. 243 

"If General Arnold likes the King of England, let him 
serve him ; we love our country, and intend to live or 
die in support of her cause." At Arnold's command 
they are made prisoners, and he stood there among 
them then, as he stands pilloried in history for all time, 
the only American soldier who, during the Revolution- 
ary War, turned traitor to his country. As Washing- 
ton returns from the inspection at West Point to Ar- 
nold's headquarters, at the Robinson House, he finds 
Hamilton holding Jameson's letters and the papers 
found on Andre. Then he understands Arnold's sud- 
den flight, the failure to greet him from the batteries 
with the accustomed salute, the general negligence and 
want of preparation for attack everywhere found. He 
stands on a mine. How far does this conspiracy ex- 
tend? Who else are implicated? The enemy may 
come this very night, and who shall be placed in posts 
of danger? Despairingly he says: "Whom can we 
trust now?" But Washington's greatness shone con- 
spicuously in great emergencies. Hamilton is dis- 
patched to intercept Arnold, if possible; Tallmadge is 
ordered to bring Andre with triple guards to West 
Point ; Greene at Tappan is directed to put the whole 
army in marching order, and before night every fort 
and defense from Putnam to Verplanck's is ready for 
an assault. Then, with no outward sign of excitement, 
Washington sat down to dinner, and with courtly kind- 
ness sent word to Arnold's hysterical and screaming 
wife: "It was my duty to arrest General Arnold, and 
I have used every exertion to do so, but I take pleas- 
ure in informing you that he is now safe on board the 
Vulture^ 



244 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

Andre was brought to West Point that night, and 
taken to the headquarters of the army at Tappan the 
next day. According to the laws and usages of war in 
relation to spies, Washington could have ordered him 
summarily to execution; but threats of retaliation, im- 
pudent letters from Arnold, extraordinary appeals and 
interpretations of Andre's conduct and position from 
Sir Henry Clinton, began to pour in upon the Com- 
mander-in-Chief. He ordered a board of ofificers to be 
convened, and submitted the case to their considera- 
tion. It was as august a tribunal as ever sat under 
like circumstances. Six major-generals and eight brig- 
adiers, as eminent as any in the service, including the 
foreign ofificers Lafayette and Steuben, formed the 
court. They gave Andre every opportunity to pre- 
sent his own defense, and when the facts were all in, 
unanimously adjudged him guilty, and that he must 
suffer the death of a spy. His youth, graces, and ac- 
complishments, his dignity and cheerfulness won the 
affections of his guard and the tenderest sympathy of 
the whole army. There was not a soldier present who 
would not have risked his life, if by so doing Arnold 
might be captured and substituted in Andre's place. 
In all the glittering splendor of the full uniform and 
ornaments of his rank, in the presence of the whole 
American army, without the quiver of a muscle or sign 
of fear, the ofificers about him weeping, the bands play- 
ing the dead march, he walked to execution. His last 
words were of loving solicitude for the welfare of moth- 
er and sisters in distant Britain, and the manner of fame 
he would leave behind. "How hard is my fate, but it 
will be but a momentary pang," he said, as he pushed 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEIV. 245 

aside the executioner and himself adjusted the rope. 
To those around he cried, "I pray you to bear witness 
that I meet my fate Hke a brave man," and swung into 
eternity. 

The supernatural served to add to the interest and 
perpetuate the memory of this tragedy. On the day of 
his execution the great tree under which he was searched 
was shattered by a bolt of lightning ; and at the same 
hour, at his home in England, his sister awoke from a 
troubled sleep screaming, "My brother is dead; he has 
been hung as a spy." 

In the British Army, and in England, the wildest 
indignation burst out against Washington. Andre was 
mourned and honored as if he had fallen in a moment 
of glorious victory at the head of his column. His 
brother was knighted, his family pensioned, and his 
King declared in solemn message that "the public can 
never be compensated for the vast advantages which 
must have followed from the success of his plan." In 
Westminster Abbey, that grand mausoleum of Eng- 
land's mighty dead, where repose her great statesmen, 
warriors, and authors, the King placed a monument 
bearing this inscription: "Sacred to the memory of 
Major John Andre, who, raised by his merit, at an early 
period of his life, to the rank of Adjutant-General of 
the British forces in America, and employed in an im- 
portant but hazardous enterprise, fell a sacrifice to his 
zeal for his King and country." Forty years after- 
ward a royal embassy came to this country, disinterred 
his remains at Tappan, and a British frigate sent for 
the purpose bore them to England, where they were 
buried beside his monument with imposing ceremo- 



246 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

nies. One of the most enlightened and liberal of Eng- 
land's churchmen, in a recent visit to this land, wrote 
the inscription for, and urged the erection of, the monu- 
ment to Andre's memory at Tappan, as the one act 
which would do more than anything else to remove the 
last vestiges of enmity between the United States and 
Great Britain. 

Andre's story is the one overmastering romance of 
the Revolution. American and English literature is 
full of eloquence and poetry in tribute to his memory 
and sympathy for his fate. After the lapse of a hun- 
dred years there is no abatement of absorbing interest. 
What had this young man done to merit immortality? 
The mission, whose tragic issue lifted him out of the 
oblivion of other minor British officers, in its inception 
was free from peril or daring, and its objects and pur- 
poses were utterly infamous. Had he succeeded by 
the desecration of the honorable uses of passes and 
flags of truce, his name would have been held in ever- 
lasting execration. In his failure, the infant Republic 
escaped the dagger with which he was feeling for its 
heart, and the crime was drowned in tears for his un- 
timely end. His youth and beauty, his skill with pen 
and pencil, his effervescing spirits and magnetic dispo- 
sition, the brightness of his life, the calm courage in 
the gloom of his death, his early love and disappoint- 
ment, and the image of his lost Honora hid in his 
mouth when captured in Canada, with the exclamation, 
"That saved, I care not for the loss of all the rest," and 
nestling in his bosom when he was slain, surrounded 
him with a halo of poetry and pity which have secured 
for him what he most sought and could never have 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. 247 

won in battles and sieges— a fame and recognition 
which have outlived that of all the generals under whom 

he served. 

Are kings only grateful, and do republics forget? 
Is fame a travesty, and the judgment of mankind a 
farce? America had a parallel case in Captain Nathan 
Hale. Of the same age as Andre, he graduated at 
Yale College with high honors, enlisted in the patriot 
cause at the beginning of the contest, and secured the 
love and confidence of all about him. When none else 
would go upon a most important and perilous mis- 
sion he volunteered, and was captured by the British. 
While Andre received every kindness, courtesy, and 
attention, and was fed from Washington's table. Hale 
was thrust into a noisome dungeon in the sugar-house. 
W^hile Andre was tried by a board of officers and had 
ample time and every facility for defense, Hale was 
summarily ordered to execution the next morning. 
While Andre's last wishes and bequests were sacredly 
followed, the infamous Cunningham tore from Hale his 
cherished Bible and destroyed before his eyes his last 
letters to his mother and sister, and asked him what he 
had to say. "All I have to say," was his reply, "is, 1 
regret I have but one life to lose for my country." His 
death was concealed for months, because Cunningham 
said he did not want the rebels to know they had a man 
who could die so bravely. And yet, while Andre rests 
in that grandest of mausoleums, where the proudest of 
nations garners the remains and perpetuates the memo- 
ries of its most eminent and honored children, the name 
and deeds of Nathan Hale have passed into obliv.on, 
and only a simple tomb in a village church-yard marks 



248 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

his resting-place. The dying declarations of Andr6 
and Hale express the animating spirit of their several 
armies, and teach why, with all her power, England 
could not conquer America. "I call upon you to wit- 
ness that I die like a brave man," said Andre, and he 
spoke from British and Hessian surroundings, seeking 
only glory and pay. "I regret I have but one life to 
lose for my country," said Hale ; and with him and his 
comrades self was forgotten in that absorbing, passion- 
ate patriotism which pledges fortune, honor, and life to 
the sacred cause. 

But republics are not ungrateful. The captors of 
Andre were honored and rewarded in their lives, and 
grateful generations celebrate their deeds and revere 
their memories. Washington wrote to Congress: "The 
party that took Major Andr6 acted in such a manner 
as does them the highest honor, and proves them to be 
men of great virtue ; their conduct gives them a just 
claim to the thanks of their country." Congress acted 
promptly. It thanked them by resolution,* granted to 
each an annuity of two hundred dollars for life, and 
twelve hundred and fifty dollars in cash, or the same 
amount in confiscated lands in Westchester County, 
and directed a silver medal, bearing the motto "Fi- 
delity" on the one side and ^'Vincit Amor Patrice'' on 
the other, to be presented to them. The Legislature 
of the State of New York gave to each of them a farm, 
in consideration — reads the act — of "their virtue in re- 
fusing a large sum offered to them by Major Andre as 
a bribe to permit him to escape." Shortly after, Wash- 
ington gave a grand dinner-party at Verplanck's Point. 
At the table were his staff and the famous generals of 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. 249 

the army, and as honored guests these three young men, 
Paulding, Williams, and Van Wart, whose names were 
now household words all over the land ; and there, with 
solemn and impressive speech, Washington presented 
the medals. Paulding died in 1818, and in 1827 the 
Corporation of the City of New York placed a monu- 
ment over his grave in the old cemetery just north of 
Peekskill, reciting, "The Corporation of the City of 
New York erected this Tomb as a Memorial Sacred to 
Public Gratitude," the Mayor delivering the address, 
and a vast concourse participating in the ceremonies. 
Van Wart died in 1828, and in the Greenburgh church- 
yard the citizens of the country erected a memorial in 
"Testimony of his Virtuous and Patriotic Conduct." 
Williams died in Livingstonville, in Schoharie County, 
in 1 83 1, and was buried with military honors. In 1876 
the State erected a monument, and his remains were 
re-interred in the old stone fort at Schoharie Court- 
house. On the spot where Andre was captured the 
young men of Westchester County, in 1853, built a 
cenotaph in honor of his captors. 

Arnold, burned in ^'^'gy in every village and hamlet 
in America, received his money and a commission in the 
British army, but was daily insulted by the proud and 
honorable officers upon whom his association was 
forced, and who despised alike the treason and the trai- 
tor. His infamy has served to gild and gloss the acts 
of Andre, and, deepening with succeeding years, brings 
out with each generation a clearer and purer apprecia- 
tion of the virtue and patriotism of Paulding, Williams, 
and Van Wart. 

Pity for Andre led to grave injustice to Washing- 



250 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

ton and detraction of his captors, which a century has 
not effaced. Sir Henry Clinton and his officers, in ad- 
dresses and memoirs, denounced the execution of An- 
dre as without justification. A contemporary British 
poetess characterized Washington as a'remorseless mur- 
derer," and one of the latest and ablest of England's his- 
torians says this act is the one indelible "blot upon his 
character," and that the decision of the military tribu- 
nal composed of men ignorant of Vattel and Puffen- 
dorff, and fresh from "plow-handles and shop-boards," 
does not relieve him. It has become a conviction 
abroad, and to some extent a sentiment here, that a 
grave and fatal error was committed. It is claimed 
that Andre was under the protection of a flag of truce; 
that he was within the American lines upon the invita- 
tion of the commander of the district, and under the 
protection of that General's pass ; that his intent was 
free from turpitude, and the circumstances surround- 
ing his position entitled him to exchange or discharge. 
When Andr^ was on trial upon the charge of being a 
spy, he testified in his own behalf that "he had reason 
to suppose he came on shore under a flag of truce," and 
such is the concurrent testimony of all the witnesses. 
The story was the subsequent invention of Arnold ; 
but, even if true, the flag is recognized in the usages of 
war for definite and honorable purposes — it ameliorates 
the horrors of the conflict ; but when used as a cover 
for treasonable purposes, loses its character and pro- 
tective power. To present it as a defense and shield 
for the corrupt correspondence of the enemy's emissary 
and a traitorous officer, is a monstrous perversion. It 
is true he was present at Arnold's invitation and carried 



CHAUNCEY M. DBPEW. 251 

his pass, but he knew the object of his visit, and did 
not hold the pass in his own name and title. Months 
before he had written to Colonel Sheldon, commanding 
the Continental outposts, that under flag and pass he 
proposed visiting, on important business, General Ar- 
nold, at West Point, and requesting safe conduct, and 
signing and representing himself as John Anderson, a 
trader. The meeting which finally took place was an 
appointment often before thwarted, and its object to 
tamper with the integrity and seduce from his alle- 
giance the enemy's officer. The signals and agencies of 
communication and travel between hostile forces were 
collusively used to procure the betrayal of an army and 
the ruin of a nation. Andre landed at Haverstraw to 
traffic with the necessities and tempt the irritated 
pride cf a bankrupt and offended general, and having 
succeeded in seducing him to surrender the forts and 
trusts under his command, Benedict Arnold, so far as 
his confederate Andr^ was concerned, ceased from that 
moment to be the American commander, and any pa- 
pers issued by him to further and conceal the scheme 
were absolutely void. His pass and safe-conduct were 
not only vitiated in their inception by the joint act of 
giver and receiver, secreting treason in them, but they 
were issued to an assumed name and borne in a false 
character, A British soldier found disguised in the 
American lines, with the plans of the patriots' forts, the 
details of their armament, and the outlines of the plot 
for their betrayal, hidden in his boots, lost, with the 
discovery of his personality and purposes, the protec- 
tion of a fraudulent certificate. Greene and Knox, 
and Lafayette and Steuben, and the other members of 



252 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

the board of officers who tried and convicted Andr^, 
may possibly have been ignorant of the great authori- 
ties upon international law; but had they studied, 
they would have found in them both precedent and 
justification. While the laws of war justify tampering 
with the opposing commander and compassing his 
desertion, the sudden, unsuspected, unguardable, and 
overwhelming character of the blow renders it the high- 
est of crimes, and subjects those detected and arrested 
in the act to summary execution. A general is com- 
missioned by his government to light its battles and 
protect its interests. The law of principal and agent is 
as applicable as to a civil transaction, and all who deal 
with him, to betray his trust, know that he is acting 
beyond the limits of his authority. Not the least re- 
markable of the incidents of this strange history was 
the proposition of Sir Henry Clinton to submit the 
question to the arbitration of the French General 
Rochambeau and the Hessian General Knyphausen. 
Such an offer would never have been made to a Euro- 
pean commander. It was an expression, in a form most 
offensive to Washington, of that supercilious contempt 
for the abilities, acquirements, and opinions of Ameri- 
can soldiers and statesmen, on the part of the ruling 
classes in England, which precipitated the Revolution 
and created this Republic. The sympathy and grief of 
Washington for Andre and his misfortunes were among 
the deepest and profoundest emotions of his life. The 
most urgent public necessity, the most solemn of pub- 
lic duties, demanded his decision. The country and 
the army were dismayed by the plot, which Congress 
declared would have been ruinous to the cause; which 



CHAUNCEY M. DRPEW. 253 

Greene proclaimed in general order would have been a 
fatal stab at our liberties; which King George the 
Third said possessed advantages that, if successful, 
could not be estimated ; and, as Sir Henry Clinton 
wrote, would have ended the conflict. Washington's 
remark to Lafayette, "Whom can we trust now?" 
echoed the sentiment of the hour. In that supreme 
moment, private considerations and personal pity sur- 
rendered to the requirements of official responsibil- 
ity, and General Washington, the Commander-in-Chief, 
stamped out treasonable sentiment within, and deterred 
treasonable efforts without, by signing the death-war- 
rant of Major John Andre. 

Andre left as a legacy a blow at his captors which, 
thirty-seven years afterward, bore extraordinary fruit. 
In 1817 one of them petitioned Congress for an in- 
crease of pension, and Major Tallmadge, then a mem- 
ber, assailed them with great vigor and virulence. He 
had been a distinguished officer in the Revolutionary 
War. It was by his energy and sagacity that Lieuten- 
ant-Colonel Jameson was prevented from delivering An- 
dr^ to Arnold, and he was in command of the guard and 
with Andre till his death. Like all the young Ameri- 
can officers about him, Tallmadge formed a warm 
friendship for him, and admiration of his character and 
accomplishments. He asserted that his captors were 
Cowboys, and that it was Andre's opinion, frequently 
expressed, that they stopped him for plunder, and 
would have released him if he could have given security 
for his ransom. Tallmadge knew nothing of either of 
them prior to this event, and his judgment was wholly 
the reflex of Andre's expressions. Andr6's remarks 



254 ORATIOiVS AND SPEECHES OF 

were either a deliberate stab at the reputations of the 
men toward whom the nation's gratitude was already 
rising with a volume which promised an immortality of 
fame, while he was waiting a shameful death, or in his 
dread extremity he could neither understand any higher 
motive in them to resist his offers, or regard with toler- 
ance or patience these humble peasants whose acts had 
ruined his fortunes and delivered him to his fate. But 
against assertions and theories stand the impregnable 
facts of history. They did reject bribes beyond the 
wildest dreams of any wealth they ever hoped to ac- 
cumulate. They did deliver him to the nearest Ameri- 
can post, and neither asked nor expected any reward. 
Van Wart had served four years in the Westchester 
Militia, and his term of enlistment had but recently ex- 
pired. Paulding had been twice a British prisoner of 
war in New York, and w^as a third time wounded in 
their hands at the declaration of peace, and the Yager 
uniform in which he had escaped but four days before 
the capture misled Andre into the impulsive revelation 
of his rank. Security for the ransom they had. As 
they were intelligent enough to understand the impor- 
tance of their prisoner, they knew that while two held 
him as hostage, the third could arrange for the delivery 
of any sum he promised upon his release. Washing- 
ton, the Continental Congress, and the Legislature of 
our own State are the contemporary witnesses, and 
their testimonies, by words and deeds, are part of the 
record which makes this day memorable. When the 
news of Major Tallmadgc's charges was received here, 
sixteen of the most respected and reputable men of our 
county — names as familiar among us as household 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. 255 

words— certified to Congress, "that during the Revolu- 
tionary War they were well acquainted with Isaac Van 
Wart, David Williams, and John Paulding, and that at 
no time during the Revolutionary War was any sus- 
picion entertained by their neighbors or acquaintances 
that they or either of them held any undue intercourse 
with the enemy. On the contrary, they were universal- 
ly esteemed, and taken to be ardent and faithful in the 
cause of the country." Van Wart and Paulding, in sol- 
emn affidavits, reasserted the details of the capture and 
the motives of their conduct. As each of them in ripe 
old age and the fullness of years was called to render 
his account to the Great Judge, mourning thousands 
gathered about the graves to testify their reverence; 
and the respect and gratitude of their countrymen 
reared monuments to their memories. 

The population, prosperity, wealth, and luxury which 
surround us here have grown upon the devastated fields 
of a century ago. We re-dedicate this cenotaph in honor 
of those whose virtues made possible this result. The 
peace, civilization, liberty, and happiness we enjoy at 
home, the power which commands for us respect 
abroad, lie in the strength and perpetuity of our repub- 
lican institutions. Had they been lost by battle or 
treason in the Revolutionary struggle, or sunk in the 
bloody chasm of civil war, the grand nationality of to- 
day would have been dependent provinces, or warring 
and burdened States. Arnold and Andre, Paulding, 
Williams, and Van Wart, are characters in a drama 
which crystallizes an eternal principle : that these insti- 
tutions rest upon the integrity and patriotism of the 
common people. We are not here to cele()rate marches, 



2S6 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

sieges, and battles. The trumpet, the charge, the wav- 
ing plume, the flying enemy, the hero's death, are not 
our inspiration. The light which made clear to these 
men the priceless value of country and liberty was but 
the glimmering dawn, compared with the noonday 
glory of the full-orbed radiance in which we stand. As 
a hundred years have ripened the fame and enriched the 
merit of their deed, so will it be rehearsed with increas- 
ing gratitude by each succeeding century. This modest 
shaft marks the memorable spot where they withstood 
temptation and saved the State, but their monument 
is the Republic — its inscription upon the hearts of its 
teeming and happy millions. 



CHA UNCE Y iM. DEPE W. 25 J 



XVII. 

ADDRESSES BEFORE THE NEW ENGLAND SOCIETY 
OF THE City of New York. 



December 22, 1875, in Response to the Toast, 

" Woman " : 

From women's eyes this doctrine I derive: 
Tiiey sparkle still the right Promethean fire ; 
They are the books, the arts, the academes 
That show, contain, and nourish all the world. 

— Loves Labor s Lost, iv. in. 

Mr. President: 

I know of no act of my life which justifies your as- 
sertion that I am an expert on this question. I can 
very well understand why it is that the toast to 
"Woman" should follow the toast to "the Press." I 
am called upon to respond to the best, the most sug- 
gestive, and the most important sentiment which has 
been delivered this evening, at this midnight hour, 
when the varied and ceaseless flow of eloquence has 
exhausted subjects and audience, when the chairs are 
mainly vacant, the bottles empty, and the oldest veteran 
and most valiant Roman of us all scarce dares meet the 
doom he knows awaits him at home. Bishop Berkeley, 
when he wrote his beautiful verses upon our Western 
World, and penned the line. 

Time's noblest offspring is the last, 
described not so nearly our prophetic future as the 



258 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

last and best creation of the Almighty — woman — whom 
we both love and worship. We have here the Presi- 
dent of the United States and the General of our armies ; 
around these tables is gathered a galaxy of intellect, 
genius, and achievement seldom presented on any oc- 
casion ; but none of them would merit the applause 
we so enthusiastically bestow, or have won their high 
honors, had they not been guided or inspired by the 
woman they revered or loved. I have noticed one 
peculiarity about the toasts of this evening very re- 
markable in the New England Society : every one of 
them is a quotation from Shakespeare. If Elder Web- 
ster and Carver and Cotton Mather, the early divines 
of Massachusetts, and the whole colony of Plymouth 
could have been collected together in general assem- 
bly, and have seen with prophetic vision the flower of 
their descendants celebrating the virtues of its ancestry 
in sentiments every one of which was couched in the 
language of a playwright, what would they have said? 
The imagination cannot compass the emotions and the 
utterances of the occasion. Rut I can understand why 
this has been done. It is because the most versatile 
and distinguished actor upon our municipal stage is the 
President of the New England Society. We live in an 
age when from the highest ofifices of our city the en- 
cumbent seeks the stage to achieve his greatest honors. 
I see now our worthy President, Mr. Bailey, industri- 
ously thumbing his Shakespeare to select these toasts. 
He admires the airy grace and flitting beauty of Tita- 
nia; he weeps over the misfortunes of Desdemona and 
Ophelia ; each individual hair stands on end as he con- 
templates the character of Lady Macbeth; but as he 



CHA UNCE Y M. DEPE W. 259 

spends his nights with JuHet, he softly murmurs, "Part- 
ing is such sweet sorrow." You know it is a physiological 
fact that the boys take after their mothers, and repro- 
duce the characteristics and intellectual qualities of the 
maternal, and not the paternal, side. Standing here in 
the presence of the most worthy representatives of 
Plymouth, and knowing as I do your moral and mental 
worth, the places you fill, and the commercial, financial, 
humanitarian, and catholic impetus you give to our 
metropolitan life, how can I do otherwise than on 
bended knee reverence the New England mothers who 
gave you birth. Your President, in his speech to-night, 
spoke of himself as a descendant of John Alden. In 
my judgment, Priscilla uttered the sentiment which 
gave the Yankee the keynote of success, and condensed 
the primal elements of his character, when she said to 
John Alden, "Prythee, why don't you speak for your- 
self, John?" That motto has been the spear in the 
rear and the star in the van of the New Englander's 
progress. It has made him the most audacious, self- 
reliant, and irrepressible member of the human family ; 
and for illustration we need look no farther than the 
present descendant of Priscilla and John Alden. 

The only way I can reciprocate your call at this late 
hour is to keep you here as long as I can. I think I 
see now the descendant of a Mayflower immortal who 
has been listening here to the glories of his ancestry, 
and learning that he is "the heir of all the ages," as, 
puffed and swollen with pride of race and history, he 
stands solitary and alone upon his doorstep, reflects on 
his broken promise of an early return, and remembers 
that within "there's a divinity that shapes his ends." 



26o ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

In all ages woman has been the source of all that is 
pure, unselfish, and heroic in the spirit and life of man. 
It was for love that Antony lost a world; it was for 
love that Jacob worked seven long years, and for seven 
more ; and I have often wondered what must have 
been his emotions when on the morning of the eighth 
year he awoke and found the homely, scrawny, bony 
Leah instead of the lovely and beautiful presence of 
his beloved Rachel. A distinguished French philoso- 
pher answered the narration of every event with the 
question, "Who was she?" Helen conquered Troy, 
plunged all the nations of antiquity into war, and gave 
that earliest, as it is still the grandest, epic which has 
come down through all time. Poetry and fiction are 
based upon woman's love, and the movements of his- 
tory are mainly due to the sentiments or ambitions she 
has inspired. Semiramis, Zenobia, Queen Elizabeth, 
claim a cold and distant admiration ; they do not touch 
the heart. But when Florence Nightingale, or Grace 
Darling, or Ida Lewis, unselfish and unheralded, peril 
all to succor and to save, the profoundest and holiest 
emotions of our nature render them tribute and hom- 
age. Mr. President, there is no aspiration which any 
man here to-night entertains, no achievement he seeks 
to accomplish, no great and honorable ambition he de- 
sires to gratify, which is not directly related to either 
a mother or a wife, or both. From the hearthstone 
around which linger the recollections of our mother, 
from the fireside where our wife awaits us, come all 
the purity, all the hope, and all the courage with which 
we fight the battle of life. The man who is not thus 
inspired, who labors rather to secure the applause of 



CHA UNCE V M. DEPE W. 261 

the world than the solid and more precious approval of 
his home, accomplishes little of good for others or of 
honor for himself. I close with the hope that each of 
us may always have near us 

A perfect Woman, nobly planned. 
To warn, to comfort, and command ; 
And yet a Spirit still, and bright 
With something of angelic light. 



December 22, 1879, in Response to the Toast, 
" The State of New York " : 

Our voice is imperial. — Henry V. 

It has been my lot, from a time which I cannot re- 
member, to respond each year to this toast. When I 
received the invitation from the committee, its origin- 
ality and ingenuity astonished and overwhelmed me. 
But there is one thing the committee took into con- 
sideration when they invited me to this platform. This 
is a Presidential year, and it becomes men not to trust 
themselves talking on dangerous topics. The State of 
New York is eminently safe. Ever since the present 
able and distinguished Governor has held his place I 
have been called upon by the New England Society to 
respond for him. It is probably due to that element 
in the New Englander that he delights in provoking 
controversy. The Governor is a Democrat, and I am a 
Republican. Whatever he believes in, I detest ; what- 
ever he admires, I hate. The manner in which this 
toast is received leads me to believe that in the New 
England Society his administration is unanimously ap- 



262 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

proved. Governor Robinson, if I understand correctly 
his views, would rather that any other man should have 
been elected as Chief Magistrate than Mr. John Kelly. 
Mr. Kelly, if I interpret aright his public utterances, 
wolud prefer any other man for Governor of New York 
than Lucius Robinson, and therefore, in one of the 
most heated controversies we have ever had, we elected 
a Governor by unanimous consent or assent in Alonzo 
B. Cornell. Horace Greeley once said to me, as we 
were returning from a State Convention where he had 
been a candidate, but the delegates had failed to nomi- 
nate the fittest man for the place : "I don't see why any 
man wants to be Governor of the State of New York, 
for there is no one living who can name the last ten 
Governors on a moment's notice." But though there 
have been Governors and Governors, there is, when 
the gubernatorial office is mentioned, one figure that 
strides down the centuries before all the rest ; that is 
the old Dutch Governor of New York, with his wooden 
leg — Peter Stuyvesant. There have been heroines, 
too, who have aroused the poetry and eloquence of all 
times, but none who have about them the substantial 
aroma of the Dutch heroine, Anneke Jans. 

It is within the memory of men now living when the 
whole of American literature was dismisssed with the 
sneer of The Edinburgh Revieiv, "Who reads an Ameri- 
can book?" But out of the American wilderness a 
broad avenue to the highway which has been trod by 
the genius of all times in its march to fame was opened 
by Washington Irving; and in his footsteps have fol- 
lowed the men who are read of all the world, and 
who will receive the highest tributes in all times — 



CHA UNCE Y M. DEPE W. 263 

Longfellow, and Whittier, and Hawthorne, and 
rrescott. 

New York is not only imperial in all those material 
results which constitute and form the greatest common- 
wealth m this constellation of commonwealths, but in 
our political system she has become the arbiter of our 
national destiny. As goes New York so goes the 
Union, and her voice indicates that the next President 
will be a man with New England blood in his veins or 
a representative of New England ideas. And for the 
gentleman who will not be elected I have a Yankee 
story. In the Berkshire hills there was a funeral, and 
as they gathered in the little parlor there came the 
typical New England female, who mingles curiosity 
with her sympathy, and as she glanced around the 
darkened room she said to the bereaved widow, 
VVhen did you get that new eight-day clock?'' 
"We ain't got no new eight-day clock," was the 
reply. "You ain't? What's that in the corner there.?" 
"Why, no, that's not an eight-day clock, that's the 
deceased ; we stood him on end, to make room for 
the mourners." 

Up to within fifty years ago all roads in New England 
led to Boston ; but within the last fifty years every by- 
way and highway in New England leads to New York. 
New York has become the capital of New England, 
and within her limits are more Yankees than in any 
three New England States combined. The boy who 
IS to-day plowing the stony hillside in New England, 
who is boarding around and teaching school, and who 
IS to be the future merchant-prince, or great lawyer, or 
wise statesman, now looks not to Boston, but to New 



264 OR A TIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

York, as the El Dorado of his hopes. And how gener- 
ously, sons of New England, have we treated you ! We 
have put you in the best ofifices ; we have made you 
our merchant-princes. Where is the city or village in 
our State where you do not own the best houses, run 
the largest manufactories, and control the principal 
industries? We have several times made one of your 
number Governor of the State, and we have placed you 
in positions where you honor us while we honor you. 
New York's choice in the National Cabinet is the dis- 
tinguished Secretary of State, whose pure Yankee blood 
renders him none the less a most fit and most eminent 
representative of the Empire State. 

When the Yankee conquered New York, his union 
with the Dutch formed those sterling elements which 
have made the Republic what it is. Yankee ideas pre- 
vailed in this land in the grandest contest in the Senate 
of the United States which has ever taken place, or 
ever will : in the victory of Nationalism over Sectional- 
ism by the ponderous eloquence of that great defender 
of the Constitution, Daniel Webster. And when, fail- 
ing in the forum. Sectionalism took the field, Yankee 
ideas conquered again in that historic meeting when 
Lee gave up his sword to Grant. And when, in the 
disturbance of credit and industry which followed, 
the twin heresies Expansion and Repudiation stalked 
abroad, Yankee ideas conquered again in the policy of 
our distinguished guest, the Secretary of the Treasury. 
So great a triumph has never been won by any finan- 
cial ofificer of the Government before as in the funding 
of our national debt at four per cent., and the restora- 
tion of the national credit, which has given an impulse 



CHA UNCE Y M. DEPE W. 265 

to our prosperity and industry that can neither be 
stayed nor stopped. 

When Hendrik Hudson sailed up the great harbor of 
New York, and saw with prophetic vision its magnifi- 
cent opportunities, he could only emphasize his thought 
with true Dutch significance, in one sentence-'-Se^ 
here! When the Yankee came and settled in New 
York, he emphasized his coming with another sen- 
tence- Sit here !" And he sat down upon the Dutch- 
man with such force that he squeezed him out of his 
cabbage-patch, and upon it he built his warehouse and 
his residence. He found this city laid out in a beauti- 
ful labyrinth of cow-patches, with the inhabitants and 
the houses all standing with their gable-ends to the 
street, and he turned them all to the avenue, and made 
New York a parallelogram of palaces; and he has 
multiplied to such an extent that now he fills every 
nook of our great State, and we recognize here to-nio-ht 
that with no tariff, with free trade between New Eng- 
land and New York, the native specimen is an improve- 
ment upon the imported article. Gentlemen, I beg 
eave to say, as a native New Yorker of many genera 
tions, that by the influence, the hospitality, the liberal 
spirit, and the cosmopolitan influences of this o-reat 
State, from the unlovable Puritan of two hundred years 
ago you have become the most agreeable and com- 
panionable of men. 

New York to-day, the Empire State of all the great 
States of the commonwealth, brings in through her 
grand avenue to the sea 80 percent, of all the imports 
and sends forth a majority of all the exports, of the 
Republic. She collects and pays four-fifths of the 



266 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

taxes which carry on the government of the country. 
In the close competition to secure the Western com- 
merce which is to-day feeding the world and seeking an 
outlet along three thousand miles of coast, she holds by 
her commercial prestige and enterprise more than all 
the ports from New Orleans to Portland combined. 
Let us, whether native or adopted New Yorkers, be 
true to the past, to the present, to the future of this 
commercial and financial metropolis. Let us enlarge 
our terminal facilities and bring the rail and the steam- 
ship close together. Let us do away with the burdens 
that make New York the dearest, and make her the 
cheapest, port on the continent ; and let us impress our 
commercial ideas upon the national legislature, so that 
the navigation laws, whch have driven the merchant 
marine of the Republic from the seas, shall be repealed, 
and the breezes of every clime shall unfurl, and the 
waves of every sea reflect, the flag of the Republic. 



December 22, 1880, in Response to the Toast, 
" The City of New York." 

For the tenth time, and under so many administra- 
tions that my politics have become mixed, I respond 
for the State of New York. As I have been looking 
around this hall to-night, my Dutch imagination has 
been wondering, and trying to solve the problem 
whether it was in view of the future of such a scene as 
this for his descendants, that the Puritan poet said that 
man is "a little lower than the angels." I attended 
with General Grant that extraordinary meeting of the 
Pilgrims in Brooklyn last night, and the speeches were 



CHA UNCE V M. DEPE W. 26 ^ 

SO long that I had just time, with the facihty afforded 
by the bridge, to reach your dinner here to-night. I 
discovered there in its full force and vigor that ''peculi- 
arity of the Yankee that makes him such a valuable 
friend of every community that it loses nothing from 
his view of it. As I understood the Yankee-Brooklyn 
idea, that city is the metropolis and New York is the 
suburb. I heard so much there last night, supple- 
mented by some remarks here to-night, that all educa- 
tion, civilization, progress, and liberty sprang from the 
Puritan, that I confess I am overloaded on one side, 
and it will take me a week or more to adjust the claims 
of one and the other races to the sphere in which we 
live. I go to my own Dutch dinner, and there believe 
that civil and religious liberty and toleration came alone 
from us. I go to the Irish dinner, and find them cipher- 
ing up the offices they have held, and exhausting their 
arithmetic to ascertain how many they will hold in the 
future. I go to the English dinner, and find the loyal 
Briton proclaiming that England would be the greatest 
nation in the world if Ireland would only stay con- 
quered. I go to the Scotch dinner, and there I ascer- 
tain that the quality of Scotch wit is like Mumm's best 
champagne— extra dry. And when I come to the New 
England dinner, as I did last night and again to-night, 
I ascertain that all the cargo in the human ship that is 
worth saving was put there by the Yankee, and I ap- 
preciate as never before the full force and beauty of 
the line : 

Truth crushed to earth shall rise again. 

New York is the foremost in all the elements which 
constitute a great commonwealth, and second only in 



268 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

power among its sister States to the State of Ohio. If 
Shakespeare had Hved in our time, the familiar Hne that 
some men are born great and some have greatness 
thrust upon them, would have been written, "Some men 
are born great and some are born in Ohio." But there 
never yet has been an Ohio man who filled fully the 
national eye, who didn't descend from New England 
ancestors. The State of New York,— what would have 
become of the Yankee but for us? In the Revolution- 
ary period New York prevented the union of the Brit- 
ish forces in Canada and on the sea-coast, which, if ac- 
complished, would have enabled Great Britain to crush 
the Yankee out. In the Constitutional period, old 
George Clinton, with three-fourths of the members, 
thought that New York, holding the channel between 
the East and West, would be greater and more inde- 
pendent by not surrendering to the Central Govern- 
ment ; but those great statesmen and patriots, Alexan- 
der Hamilton, John Jay, and Chancellor Livingston, by 
force and genius and logic won over that Convention, 
so that New York came into the great compact ; the 
nation was created and the Yankee was safe. Prior to 
that time he had a place in which he might be born and 
where his bones could be deposited, but ever after he 
had a place where he could live. Other States may 
claim to be the mother and the creator of Presidents, 
but New York alone elects them. And when I circu- 
late among my brethren who were defeated and disap- 
pointed in this contest, and who are looking around 
with such vengeful earnestness to find somebody who 
was responsible for the results in order that they may 
sacrifice him on the spot, I am reminded of a New Eng- 



CHA UNCE V M. DEPE IV. 269 

land story. There are certain portions of Vermont 
where the only recreation and pleasure of the inhabi- 
tants is the attendance upon funerals. A friend of 
mine up there last summer engaged in the diversion of 
the neighborhood, and went to one of these gatherings. 
After the preacher had concluded, he was startled by 
the undertaker, who got up and announced this notice : 
"Friends will be patient ; the exercises are briefly post- 
poned because the corpse has been mislaid." 

There is a relationship between the Yankee and 
the Dutchman very remote. It is true the connection 
would never have been found out, but the Yankee dis- 
covered it, for the reason that, beyond all other races, 
he is agile in climbing the genealogical tree and pluck- 
ing a relationship from the topmost branches, when it 
suits his purposes and when it is for his profit to do so. 
The original stock settled in Holland, diked out the 
sea, and raised a nation. One part remained there, and 
the other went over into England and became Puri- 
tans. But the original stock, remaining in Holland, liv- 
ing by themselves, resisted the powers of oppression, 
dispersed darkness all about them, gave unity to the 
states, created civil and religious liberty, and discovered 
that these great principles could only be secured by 
promoting a sound education. For a century Holland 
remained the sole spot in the world where the liberties 
of mankind were secure. Over in England the Puritan 
was surrounded on all sides by ecclesiastical and civil 
oppression. He resisted manfully and sustained his in- 
dependence and his faith, but the pressure narrowed 
him down, so that after a while he sought a spot where 
he might have the largest room for the free exercise 



270 ORATIONS AiXD SPEECHES OF 

of his own opinions — a spot where there would not be 
any room for the exercise of anybody else's opinions. 
The Dutchman receiv^ed him, when he came, as a long 
lost relative, with traditional hospitality; but after he 
had remained for many years, he said to his Dutch en- 
tertainers, "I can practice my own religion, it is true, 
but there are too many religions among you for my 
comfort — I must emigrate"; and so he emigrated to 
New England. There the seeds of liberty and tolera- 
tion, planted first in Holland, have, in these sons of 
Dutch and English, flowered and fruited into men of 
the best quality any nation has ever seen. When there 
were less than twenty thousand persons in New England 
they thought they were too closely settled, and looking 
over into Connecticut, found it fair and fruitful. There 
they saw the Dutchman prosperous and happy, and 
coming in upon him, cried out, "My long-lost cousin 
Dicdrich ; how do you do?" They came as guests, but 
they remained with him for a hundred and fifty years. 
Fortunately for us, there is a dispute among the Yan- 
kees by which one celebrates the 21st and the other 
the 22d as Forefathers' Day, and I, as the representa- 
tive of Dutchmen, attend both dinners; and that is the 
only return we get for a hundred and fifty years of 
hospitality. 

Another reason why we come to this dinner, when 
we get an invitation, is best stated in the story of a 
temperance lecturer who was caught by a disciple after 
he retired, taking a hot whisky punch. Said his 
shocked follower, "I thought you were a total ab- 
stainer." "So I am," said the lecturer, "but not a 
bigoted one." 



CtiA iJNCE V M. DEPE W. 271 

These Yankees, when they came over here a hun- 
dred and fifty years ago, married the best Dutch girls, 
and they brought with them bright and handsome sis- 
ters whose quick and active minds captured the more 
sluggish intellects of our Dutch boys, and that stock, 
as Dr. Storrs has well said, has made New York the 
Empire State of the confederacy. If John Alden and 
Priscilla, the Puritan maiden, should come into this 
room to-night, neither of them would recognize their 
sons upon the floor or their daughters in the gallery ; 
and if they should partake of the dinner furnished to 
us here, the indigestion which would follow would im- 
press upon their minds, as nothing else could, the ideas 
of a Puritan hereafter. But although there has been a 
large departure from the standard of two hundred and 
fifty years ago, they would recognize in their descend- 
ants the best elements of the original stock, conform- 
ing themselves to the civilization of the times, and they 
would find the Yankee of to-day, like the Yankee of 
all days, the only one of any race who becomes, even 
when a tramp, a beneficent addition to the region in 
which he settles. 

The Mayflozver sailed to Plymouth ; the Half-Moon 
sailed to Manhattan Island. Each bore a valuable con- 
tribution to humanity and civilization, but in the com- 
pleteness in which they were united upon the soil of 
New York they have created those elements that have 
crystallized into all time that which we enjoy and in- 
tend to pass down to after-ages, known as the Declara- 
tion of Independence and the Constitution of the 
United States. 



272 orations and speeches of 

December 22, 1882, in Response to the Toast, 
"The Half-Moon and the Mayflower." 

It is embarrassing for the representative of a con- 
quered people to have devolve upon him at the great 
festival of the conqueror the unpleasant duty of plac- 
ing the crooked pin upon the hero's chair, to remind 
him when he sits down that he is mortal. The Yankees 
have swarmed into the fair land of the Knickerbockers, 
filled its places of business and trust, held the few ofifi- 
ces left unoccupied by the Irish, married the daughters 
of the house, and as the disinterested brothers-in-law 
administered upon and absorbed the estate. And yet 
upon the principle of the old epitaph that "he who 
saves loses, he who spends saves, and he who gives 
away takes it with him," the Dutch are a thousandfold 
richer for their loss. The garden in which they vege- 
tated in peaceful content has become an empire ; Puri- 
tan bigotry spiritualized and humanized by Dutch tole- 
rance, Dutch inertia vitalized by Yankee energy, Dutch 
frugality fired by Yankee thrift, Dutch steadfastness 
enthused by Yankee patriotism, Dutch babies crossed 
with Yankee blood, have conquered the world. We are 
never luminous after 4 o'clock except at our Knicker- 
bocker feast. You must visit us there. The tenor of 
one of our city churches, whose pulpit is occupied by 
a famous preacher, said to me recently: "You must 
come again ; the fact is, the Doctor and myself were 
not at our best last Sunday morning. We artists can- 
not be always at our best." 

The questioning character of my sentiment is indica- 
tive of the resistless inquisitiveness and acquisitiveness 



CHA UNCE Y M. DEPE W. 273 

which are the rudiments of Yankee success. Wander, 
ing with other tourists over the splendid estate of the 
Duke of Westminster, near Chester, and admiring the 
palace he was decorating for his bride, I heard a Berk- 
shire man say to the gardener, who acted as guide: 
"What; you can't tell how much the house cost, nor 
what this farm yields an acre, nor what the old man's 
income is, nor how much he is worth? Don't you Brit- 
ishers know anything?" 

History, poetry, and eloquence have immortalized 
the few voyages freighted with humanity's hopes. The 
Grecian Argo has inspired fable and epic, — the great 
steamship traversing the ocean in seven days, between 
the Old World and the New, with her tons and passen- 
gers numbered by thousands, is the unnoticed common- 
place of the hour. But of greater moment than fabled 
Argo and the combined fleets of commerce were the 
sailing and the landing of the Mayflozver and the Half- 
Moon. They carried the principles of a new and higher 
civilization, and bore a charter of liberty broader and 
better than was ever known before. 

The compact signed in the cabin of the Mayflower, 
guaranteeing to all the protection of "just and equal 
laws," after two hundred and lifty years of strife, humili- 
ation, and civil war, found a permanent home in the 
fundamental law by the Fourteenth Amendment to the 
Constitution, pledging, without regard to creed or color, 
the universal blessing of just and equal laws. The Puri- 
tan, worsted in his battle with the Cavalier in 1620, fled 
to the wilderness; the Puritan, triumphant over like 
elements in 1865, broke down the barriers of caste, and 
welcomed bondman and freeman alike to equal liberties 



2 74 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

with himself. And yet this splendid record of match- 
less achievement, the inspiration of every orator to-night, 
would have been impossible without the Dutch. The 
men who wrested a country from the sea were of the 
same stock with Pym, Sidney, Hampden, and Crom- 
well. Fighting for their homes and lives against the 
invading ocean on the one side, and the hosts of des- 
potism and darkness upon all sides, they learned the 
lesson that freedom rests upon education, and educa- 
tion begets and fosters civil and religious liberty. 
They provided for the Puritan both an asylum and a 
university. The Puritans landed in Holland with a 
fierce purpose to find a place where there should be full 
liberty for their own religion and no liberty for any- 
body else. They left, applauding the parting words of 
Robinson, that neither to Calvin nor Luther, nor to 
any man, has God revealed all of His truth. The two 
most potent factors of modern liberty were William of 
Orange and Oliver Cromwell, but the triumph of "Will- 
iam's beggars of the sea" made possible the victory of 
Naseby and Marston Moor. In an age of force their 
Grotius had laid the foundations of international law, 
the peaceful arbitration of states; in an age of dense 
ignorance they had invented types. The Union of 
Utrecht of 1579 was the model of colonial confedera- 
tion; the Declaration of Independence at the Hague of 
1 581 was the seed carried hy \.\iQ Mayflozver and the 
Half-Moon to America, from which grew the immortal 
sentiment of 1776. 

New York has always illustrated the cosmopolitan 
and hospitable character of the Dutch. Her first and 
most famous Governor, Clinton, was an Irishman ; her 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEIV. 275 

first and most eminent statesman, Hamilton, a Scotch- 
man; her first and ablest jurist. Jay, a Huguenot; and 
only her first and most chivalric soldier, Schuyler, of 
the household of her founders. And in the last elec- 
tion we had the choice for Governor between two Yan- 
kees of pure blood, one by way of Connecticut and the 
other from Connecticut around by way of New Jersey. 
So far as the returns have come in, the Jerseyman ap- 
pears to have been elected. It has been said that the 
Pilgrim Fathers would have disowned their roystering 
descendants were they introduced to this annual revel, 
but their banquet on the eve of their departure from 
Delft Haven lasted all night, though history is silent 
upon the speeches of the guests or their condition in 
the morning. The Puritans who came afterward burnt 
witches, hung Quakers, and banished Baptists, but the 
Pilgrims who had spent eleven years in Holland strug- 
gled against this bigotry and intolerance. They were the 
leaven liberalizing their brethren with such mighty suc- 
cess that in this year of grace Massachusetts elects Ben 
Butler Governor, and New England professors and di- 
vines in this hall welcome Herbert Spencer and illustrate 
the practical processes of evolution by smashing the pa- 
triarchs and knocking out of the Bible prophecy and 
hell. 

The Mayfloiver was not the first ship which anchored 
in Plymouth Harbor: the Dutch had been there, but 
they were equal to neither the climate nor soil. Eigh- 
teen years before. Captain Pring had landed there, and 
says he was hospitably entertained by the savages with 
steaming dishes of peas and beans. This traditional 
and frugal fare at the dinner at Plymouth last night has 



276 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

prepared the representatives of that society for a Del- 
monico banquet to-night. I state this fact with timid- 
ity, because a stray remark of mine at the Brooklyn din- 
ner last year, about the relations betwen New England 
progress and pumpkin-pie, drew down upon me a famous 
assault from the leading newspaper of Massachusetts. 
It seemed to me to mark that decadence of a race 
where the enervated descendant blushes for the robust 
and homely virtues of his ancestor. The sentiment of 
to-day was freely expressed by the New England 
girl who mistook the first milestone out of Boston for 
a tombstone, and reading its inscription, "i M. from 
Boston, " said, " 'I'm from Boston.' How simple, how 
sufficient !" The farmer's shot at Concord which echoed 
around the world was the inevitable expression of the 
ever-expanding principles of Plymouth. They have 
overleaped all artificial and natural boundaries. They 
plant the school-house and the church in every new 
settlement. They maintain and finally vindicate the 
purity of the ballot from every peril. They extend the 
suffrage in Great Britain, nationalize Germany, repub- 
licanize France, and imprison the Czar. While we 
iaugh at the claim of every one of the twenty million 
of descendants of the Pilgrims, that in his house is a 
chair and table that came over in the Mayflotuer ; while 
we know not which to admire most, the ability of the 
forefathers to compact furniture on a sixty-ton ship, or 
the capacity of their heirs to expand facts to meet the 
needs of a continent, it is a weakness and pride more 
noble than that which boasts of the armor and weapons 
in feudal castle and baronial hall — relics of carnage and 
courage for territory and power. 



CHA UNCE Y M. DEPE W. 277 

Of the kings, princes, generals, statesmen, preachers, 
who filled the world's stage in 1620, no man in this au- 
dience can name one. They rest in forgotten graves; 
while on this anniversary night fifty millions hail with 
gratitude the names of Miles Standish and his army of 
ten men, of Brewster, Carver, Winthrop, and their broad 
statesmanship, of Robinson and his tender piety and 
toleration of all creeds, as the founders of a government 
of the people, for the people, and by the people, which 
shall not perish from the earth. 



December 22, 1884, in Response to the Toast, 
"The State of New York." 

It marks the evolution of your race that a Brooklyn 
man (General Stewart L. Woodford) presides over the 
New York Society. When he attends the annual meet- 
ing of the Brooklyn branch, he says he comes as a vas- 
sal bringing the subject city across the bridge with him, 
while here he claims the autocracy of the Avorld, The 
solution of this para'dox is, that with the citizens of 
Brooklyn modesty is purely a domestic product and 
never carried abroad. I have responded so often to the 
sentiment you have given me, that when it came again 
I felt like the good brother in the class-meeting of a 
Methodist church in a Pennsylvania town, who, when 
the experiences had all been told and the exhortations 
lagged, and the prayers grew feeble, remarked : "My 
brethren, as the regular exercises to-night seem to halt 
a little, I will improve the time by making a few obser- 



278 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

vations on the tariff." The gentleman who answers for 
the State is supposed to speak for the Executive, and 
as I have done this during every administration for 
twenty years, I have discovered that when trying to 
feel as the Governor of the hour, whether he be Mor 
gan, Hoffman, Fenton, Dix, Tilden, Robinson, or Cor- 
nell, might under similar circumstances, my mental and 
moral conditions have been rather remarkable. 

It is one of the present distinctions of our State, that 
its Capitol has become the Mecca of half the nation. 
It is a safe prediction to offer to both confident and 
hopeless patriots that the Cabinet the President-elect 
thinks he will select in December is not the one he will 
send to the Senate in March. New York, always im- 
perial and original, settled in the late campaign, in a 
grand way which startled the world, the effects, as fac- 
tors in politics, of gastronomy and theology. None of 
us who with hurts and wounds are trying to look cheer- 
ful will ever, when recalling the feast or the sermon, 
have any doubts as to the distinction between a boom 
and a boomerang. But while recognizing the right of 
the victors to rejoice, the vanquished have the happy 
privilege of extracting comfort from the fact that in the 
ultimate assortment and assimilation upon policies and 
principles of all the elements which carried our pivotal 
State, the experiences may be repeated of the lady who 
astonished the quiet citizens of the Dutch hamlet of 
Peekskill when I was a boy, by introducing a coach-dog. 
The first rain-storm washed off the black spots, and 
when the purchaser remonstrated with the dog-mer- 
chant, he said : "Beg pardon, ma'am, but there is a mis- 
take; there was an umbrella went with that dog." It 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. 279 

is the misfortune of our State that she is big enough to 
be careless and contented, and not sufficiently large or 
small to be opinionated and aggressive. 

The natural highway between the ocean and the lakes 
was utilized by De Witt Clinton to construct the water- 
way which created empires in the West and a metropo- 
lis on the coast. Alexander Hamilton formulated the 
National and our State constitutions, and constructed 
a financial system which has survived the first century 
of the Republic, while with Jay he formed two of the 
triumvirate who carried through the Federal Union. 
Any other State would have been filled with the ima- 
ges of these men in marble and in bronze, and the 
whole country deafened with their fame, and illumi- 
nated with the light shed on the capacity of their com- 
monwealth for leadership ; but we have erected no 
public statues or monuments to perpetuate their memo- 
ries. It is not pleasant for us to note that ten thou- 
sand billions of invested and active capital cannot see 
the plate which begs the dole to pay the expenses of 
receiving the grand emblem of Liberty contributed by 
France to cement, by the triumphs of peace between a 
young republic and her elder sister, a compact of friend- 
ship signed in blood a century ago, between an old 
monarchy and a young republic. If the metropolis 
knew as much of, and took as deep an interest in, the 
great centers of activity and intelligence in the interior 
like Utica, Syracuse, Rochester, and Buffalo, as they do 
in the metropolis, it would promote healthful state 
pride, cordial good-neighborhood, better legislation, and 
home-rule in local government. 

But with large opportunities for criticism come far 



28o ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

greater elements for praise. When the heroes of the 
Boston tea-party were in their cradles, New York started 
the Revolution which ended in independence. The 
Erie Canal created a new era in the commerce of the 
globe. Irving solved the Edinburgh reviewer's riddle, 
"Who reads an American book?" New York's great 
journalistic quartette, Greeley, Raymond, Bennett, and 
Weed, made the newspaper the arbiter of our laws 
and our morals. The Brooklyn Bridge is the eighth 
wonder of the world, and the Capitol at Albany sur- 
passes in size and solidity those of all the other States 
together. The Empire State houses her Legislature 
in a palace which rivals any parliament house in the 
world, and with surroundings fit for the loftiest elo- 
quence and most masterly statesmanship. She has 
made the annual dinner of the New England Society 
an event which suspends the operations of governments 
and commands the attention of the universe. I never 
was more convinced of her boundless hospitality than 
in a recent survey of our contest for United States 
Senator. I found that our Governor was a Jerseyman, 
the Mayor of our city a Vermonter, our local govern- 
ment and metropolitan judiciar}- Irish, and the candi- 
dates for Senator all Yankees, and concluded that a 
native of the State had better not intrude. 

The Pilgrim planted beside his meeting-house the 
Dutch common-school, and inaugurated with his scanty 
fare the custom which he had found at Leyden, and in 
which his descendant revels, under the name of Thanks- 
giving Day. The Puritans direct from England, who 
landed twenty years after in Massachusetts Bay. 
burned witches, hung Quakers, and banished Baptists, 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. 281 

but all sectaries fleeing from those persecutions found 
hospitable welcome at Plymouth. The men who stood 
on this famed rock were the leaven of American liberty. 

The Puritan exhibited his religion in the cut of his 
coat and the style of his hat; the Dutchman wore the 
same clothes, no matter what his creed. The Puritan 
sang with the nasal twang and stormed the gates of 
Heaven through his nose; the Dutch offered their peti- 
tions in the natural way, and the only Dutchman whose 
facial ornament has become historic was Antony Van 
Corlear, who with it defied the mossbunkers in Spuyten 
Duyvil Creek, and attracted the sturgeons off Antony's 
Nose, — but it was not for him or his an instrument with 
which to pry open the doors of Paradise. But as a de- 
scendant of the vanquished race, I freely admit that 
the best thing which ever happened for them, their 
State, and the country, was their conquest by the 
Yankees. The Dutchman was too easily content with 
earthly ease and comfort to be a pioneer and state, 
builder; he needed the stimulus of a people who are 
never satisfied, to whom acquisition increases appetite 
in earthly matters, as the church fence breeds an irre- 
sistible inclination to climb over it in things spiritual. 

One of the most eminent of New England divines, 
himself the son of a Puritan clergj'^man, told me that 
when a boy he heard the deacons at his father's house 
discussing the merits of their respective ministers. 
After many had spoken, one old elder said : "Wa'al, our 
minister gives so much attention to his farm and orch- 
ard, that we get pretty poor sermons; but he is mighty 
movin' in prayer in caterpillar and canker-worm time." 
It is this spirit which held the town-meeting in the 



282 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

church; which made God a partner in every honest call- 
ing, useful pursuit, and perilous enterprise ; that made 
possible the victories of Grant and of Sherman, that 
moved Mason and Dixon's line into the Gulf of Mexico, 
that with telegraphs and railroads has developed 
new commonwealths and liberalized governments to 
meet all the needs of expanding empire, and that gave 
to the second century a Republic so much grander 
than the forefathers planted in the first. 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. 283 



S 



XVIII. 

PEECH AT THE SiXTH ANNUAL FESTIVAL OF THE 

New England Society of Pennsylvania, at 
THE Continental Hotel, Philadelphia, De- 
cember 22, 1886, IN Reply to the Toast, "The 
New Netherlanders, the Pilgrim Fathers of 
Manhattan." 



Mr. President and Gentlemen: 

I do not see why you should send to New York for 
after-dinner speakers when you have a chairman fully 
equipped to make a speech upon every toast that is 
presented. He takes the meat, as it were, desiccates 
it, and leaves the shell for the unfortunate guest who is 
to follow. Next year we will take him over to New 
York. The President of the New England Society of 
New York said to me : "Depew, you know a good thing 
when you see it. If you find anything of that sort in 
Philadelphia, let us know." I have found it. 

I met on the train coming over here to-night a Penn- 
sylvania Dutchman of several generations, who asked 
me what business called me to Philadelphia. I replied : 
"I am going to attend the annual banquet of the New 
England Society of Pennsylvania; which I understand 
to be the most important event that takes place in that 
State." He remarked : "I did not know there was such 
a society, nor did I know there were enough Yankees 



284 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

in Philadelphia to form a decent crowd around a dinner- 
table; because the Yankees can't make money in Phila- 
delphia, and a Yankee never stays where he can't make 
money." 

It is a most extraordinary thing that one should come 
from New York to Philadelphia for the purpose of at- 
tending a New England dinner. It is a most extraordi- 
nary thing that a New England dinner should be held 
in Philadelphia. Your chairman to-night spoke of the 
hard condition of the Puritans who landed on Plymouth 
Rock. Let me say that if the Puritans had come 
up the Delaware, landed here, and begun life with terra- 
pin and canvas-back duck, there never would have 
been any Puritan story to be retailed from year to year 
at Forefathers' dinners. If William Penn had ever con- 
templated that around his festive board would sit those 
Puritans with whom he was familiar in England, he 
would have exclaimed : "Let all the savages on the 
continent come, but not them." It is one of the pleas- 
ing peculiarities of the Puritan mind, as evinced in the 
admirable address of Mr. Curtis here to-night (and when 
you have heard Mr. Curtis, you have heard the best 
that a New Englander, who has been educated in New 
York, can do), that when they erect a monument in 
Philadelphia or New York to the Pilgrim or Puritan, 
they say : "See how these people respect the man whom 
they profess to revile." But they paid for them and 
built the monuments themselves. The only New Eng- 
landers of Philadelphia whom I have met are the offi- 
cials of the Pennsylvania Railroad. When I dine with 
them, enjoy their hospitality, revel in that glorious 
sociability which is their characteristic and charm, I 



CHAVNCEY m. depew. 285 

think that they are Dutchmen ; when I meet them in 
business, and am impressed with their desire to pos- 
sess the earth, I think that they came over in the May- 
flower. 

There is no part of the world to-night, whether it be 
in the Arctic Zone, or under the equatorial sun, or in 
monarchies, or in despotisms, or among the Fiji Island- 
ers, where the New Englanders are not gathered for the 
purpose of celebrating and feasting upon Forefathers' 
Day. But there is this peculiarity about the New Eng- 
lander, that if he cannot find anybody to quarrel with, 
he gets up a controversy with himself — inside of him- 
self. We who expect to eat this dinner annually — and 
to take the consequences — went along peacefully for 
years with the understanding that the 22d of December 
was the day, when it suddenly broke out that the New 
Englander, within himself, had got up a dispute that 
the 2 1 St was the day. I watched it with interest, be- 
cause I always knew that when a Yankee got up a con- 
troversy with anybody else, it was for his profit ; and 
I wondered how he could make anything by having 
a quarrel with himself. Then I found that he ate both 
the dinners with serene satisfaction ! But wh)^ should 
a Dutchman — a man of Holland descent — bring "coals 
to Newcastle" by coming here among the Pennsylvania 
Dutch for the purpose of attending a New Englander 
dinner? It is simply another tribute extorted by the 
conqueror from the conquered people, in compelling 
him not only to part with his possessions, his farms, his 
sisters, his daughters, but to attend the feast, to see de- 
voured the things raised upon his own farm, and then to 
assist the conqueror to digest them by telling him stories 



286 OR A TIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

My first familiarity with the Boston mind and its pe- 
CLiHarities was when I was a small boy, in that little 
Dutch hamlet on the Hudson where I was born, when 
we were electrified by the state superintendent of 
Massachusetts coming to deliver us an address. He 
said : "My children, there was a little flaxen-haired boy 
in a school that I addressed last year; and when I came 
over this year, he was gone. Where do you suppose 
he had gone?" One of our little Dutch innocents re- 
plied, "To Heaven." "Oh no, my boy," the superin- 
tendent said, "he is a clerk in a store in Boston." 

John Winslow said that the Connecticut River was 
the dividing line between the Continent of New Eng- 
land and the Continent of America ; and he foresaw 
the time, in his imagination, when there should grow 
up, upon the eastern side of the Connecticut River, a 
population of hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, 
who would enjoy their homes, their liberties, civil and 
religious, and build up a state. He never looked for- 
ward to that time, in the evolution of the species, 
when the New England farm would pass from the hands 
of the Puritan into the possession of the Irishman, who 
would cultivate it and earn a living where the Yankee 
could not live, and who would threaten the supremacy 
of New England faith and the supremacy of New Eng- 
land politics. If he had looked forward, he would have 
rejoiced in the fact that in the expansion of the New 
England idea and in the exodus of the New England 
Pilgrim, the Yankee marched forth over the continent 
to possess it and to build it up in the interests of civil 
and religious liberty; so that, instead of a few hundred 
tiioiisands on the sterile hills of New England, sixty 



CHA UNCE Y M. DEPE W. 287 

millions of people should rise up and call him blessed 
in the plenitude of a power, a greatness, and a future un- 
equaled among the nations of the earth. 

If from any of the planets in our sphere there should 
come a being endowed with larger perceptions and ob- 
servations than our own, and not familiar with our civil- 
ization or creeds, and he should drop in at a New Eng- 
land dinner anywhere to-night, he might ask, "Who are 
these people?" and he would be told, "They are the 
people who claim to have created this great Republic, 
and to have put into it all that is in it that is worth 
preserving." If he should ask, "What is their creed 
and faith, and what do they worship?" he would be 
told to wait and listen to their speeches. When finally 
he had gone out, he would say, "They worship their 
forefathers and themselves." And yet there is not a 
descendant of the Pilgrims in this room to-night who 
could stay in a ten-acre lot for three hours with his an- 
cestors, to save his soul. There is not one of those 
gaunt, ascetic, and bigoted men who sang through his 
nose and talked cant, as described here so effectively 
on the other side of the picture presented by Mr. Cur- 
tis, who would not have every one of his descendants 
here to-night put into the lock-up as roystering blades, 
dangerous to the morals of the community; but, never- 
theless, I can join in that measure of sweet song, of 
magnificent adulation, and superb eulogium which has 
been given to us from the tongue and pen of one who 
has no equal among our speakers and writers. 

The Puritan was a grand character. He was a grand 
character because of what he was and did, and because 
of what circumstances made him. Fighting with the 



288 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

State for his liberty, he learned to doubt, and then to 
deny, the divine right of kings. Fighting with the 
Church for his conscience, its possession and expression, 
he learned to doubt, and then to deny, the divine right 
of hierarchies; but this created within him that spirit 
which made him recognize that the only foundation of 
the Church, if it will live, that the only foundation of 
the State, if it will be free, is man and the manhood of 
individuals. The family idea of all ages created the 
patriarch and his rule, the chieftain of the tribe and his 
rale, the despot and his rule, the military chieftain and 
his rule, the feudal lord and his rule ; every step illum- 
ining the individual, crushing liberty, producing despot- 
ism, making the riders and the ridden ; but when the 
Puritan discovered, as he enunciated in the cabin of 
the Mayflower, that there should be just and equal laws, 
and before those laws all men should stand equal; 
when he carried out in his administration that here 
should be the township as the basis of the state, and 
the state as the unit out of which should be created the 
Republic, then he discovered the sublime and eternal 
principle which solves all difficulties of home rule and 
modern liberty. 

Now this magnificent man never would have amount- 
ed to much — never would have founded a state, never 
would have builded a government — if Providence had 
not sent him to Holland among my ancestors. The 
Pilgrim who went to Holland, and there learned toler- 
ation ; there learned to respect the rights, the opinions, 
and liberties of others; there learned the principle of 
the common school and universal education ; when he 
got to Plymouth Rock never burned witches, never 



CHA UNCE y M. DEPE W. 289 

hung Quakers, never drove out Baptists; he always 
fought against all this. It was the Puritan, twenty 
thousand strong, who came years afterward, who did 
those things ; and, except for the leaven of the Pilgrim 
who had been to Holland, the Puritan would not be 
celebrated here to-night. Four hundred of them went 
to Holland, every man with a creed of his own and anx- 
ious to burn at the stake the other three hundred and 
ninety-nine because they did not agree with him ; but 
being there enlightened, they discovered the magnifi- 
cence of the universe. All over Holland, they saw 
compulsory school education sustained by the State. 
They found a country in which there was universal tol- 
eration of religion ; in which the persecuted Jew could 
find an asylum ; in which even the Inquisitor could 
be safe from the vengeance of his enemies ; and there, 
after they had been prepared to found a state, and to 
build it, when they got down to Delft-Haven to depart, 
the Dutchmen, in their hospitality, gave them a fare- 
well dinner as a send-off. It was the first good din- 
ner they had ever had— the first square meal the Puritan 
had ever eaten. It followed that when they went on 
board the ship they were happy and they were— full. 
I do not know whether the word "full" had the same 
significance in those times that it has now, or not. And 
then Pastor Robinson preached the sermon in the after- 
noon, in which he told them that the whole truth was 
not given to Luther, though he thought so, nor to Cal- 
vin, though his disciples said so ; but that in the future 
there would be a development of the truth which they 
must nurse and evolve. See how they have nursed 
and evolved it ! Why, they have nursed and evolved 



ago ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

that truth into so many creeds and doctrines on the 
sterile hills of New England, that they deny the exis- 
tence of a heaven — many of them; and many more 
would deprive us of the comforts of a hell for — some 
people. 

Now who were those people who founded New Neth- 
erlands, and who entertained so hospitably those Puri- 
tans and gave them such a grand send-off? I remem- 
ber that a vicious and irate adherent of the Stuarts 
says, in his history, looking with vengeance upon the 
accession of William of Orange to the throne of Eng- 
land, that the Puritan and the Hollander were shaken 
out of the same bag. And so they were. The same 
vigorous Northern stock came down to settle upon the 
marshes of Holland and in the fens of England. The 
stock that remained in England produced Pym and 
Hampden, and Sidney and Russell, with a cross of 
Swedish pirate or Northern conqueror; but the original 
stock which went to Holland fought off forever, during 
its whole existence, the power of the Roman Empire ; 
fought off the hordes of barbarians who came down 
upon the ruins of the Roman Empire; fought of^ all 
the forces and powers of medieval chivalry, and won 
their grand victory when they took from the sea her- 
self a land, that upon it they might govern themselves 
upon the principles of their own manhood and of civil 
and religious liberty. Those people were not a selfish 
people ; but they liked to be by themselves and to 
govern themselves. Theirs was precisely the sentiment 
of the Hebrew speculator in Wall Street recently, who, 
when he had scooped everybody about him, gathered 
his co-conspirators around the festive board and said to 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. 291 

them, "Now, shentlemen, we feel shust as if we were 
among ourselves." 

Holland, at a time when there was no light for man 
elsewhere in the world, preserved the principles of civil 
liberty. Holland, at a time when learning was crushed 
out or buried in the monasteries, had her asylums, her 
libraries, and her universities. Holland, at a time when 
the bigotry of the Church crushed out all expression of 
conscience and individual belief, had her toleration and 
religious liberty. For a century Holland was the safe- 
deposit company of the rights of man. For a century 
Holland was the electric light which illumined the world 
and saved mankind. 

But, gentlemen, how did your forefathers repay my 
ancestors for all this kindness? Why, you came over 
to New York to teach school, and you got into the con- 
fiding Dutch families ; you married their daughters ; and 
then, as the able son-in law, you administered upon 
the estate and you gave us — what was left. Yet I am 
willing to admit that the Dutchmen never could have 
colonized this country or created this Republic. I am 
willing to admit that my ancestors were too pleasure- 
loving, comfort-loving, and home-loving. They needed 
just that strain which you have, which is never tired, 
never restful, never at peace; just that strain which, re- 
ceiving sufficient capital to start with from my ances- 
tors, went out and crossed the borders and built up 
all these grand Western and Northwestern States, and 
carried civilization across the continent to the Pacific 
coast. You go into a territory, you organize the men 
of all nationalities and of all languages who are there 
into a territorial government ; then you organize them 



292 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

into a state ; then you take the governorships and the 
judgeships; then you found the capital at the place 
where you own all the town-lots ; then you bring the 
territory into the Union, and the glory and perfection 
of the federal principle is vindicated. But without you 
and just these incentives we never would have had an 
American Republic as great and glorious as it is. 

But with all your selfishness, with all your desire for 
profit, for pelf, for gain, there is this underlying princi- 
ple in the Yankee : in every community which he founds, 
in every State which he builds, he carries with him the 
church ; he carries with him the school-house. He may 
want money, and he will get it if he can ; he may 
want property, and he will get it if he can ; but, first 
and foremost, he must have liberty of conscience, liber- 
ty of thought, liberty of speech — all of liberty that be- 
longs to a man, consonant with the liberty of others; 
and he must have that same liberty for every man be- 
side himself. 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. 293 



XIX. 

ADDRESS BEFORE THE CHAMBER OF COMMERCE, 
May 10, 1881, IN Response to the Toast, "The 
State of New York." 

Mr. President and Gentlemen of the Chamber 
OF Commerce: 
Having been an active politician and partisan all my 
life, nothing affords me more pleasure than to vary the 
entertainment, and be present among a body of gentle- 
men with whom politics and partisanship do not exist. 
I have responded, during the present year, ten times, 
and constantly during the last fifteen years, to the State 
of New York. It misled me in the earlier part of the 
year into the belief that there was an anxious desire on 
the part of the people of the State to put me into a 
position where, instead of being here to speak, I should 
write one of the two letters which have just been read.* 
The only harm done by that amiable hallucination was 
the anxiety it occasioned in the breasts of the gen- 
tlemen who were similarly afflicted — for example, my 
friend, Mr. Levi P. Morton. Having in a professional 
way for some years been engaged in a continuous and 
noisy fusillade with an active committee of the Cham- 
ber of Commerce, it was with great trepidation I at- 
tended this banquet unprotected and alone; bu t I re- 
* United States Senators Conkling and Piatt. 



294 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

member that the merchants of New York, in their long 
history, were peculiarly noted for two things : their for- 
giveness of their enemies, and the facility with which, 
if they can get the legs of their foes under their ma- ■ 
hogany, they invariably captured them. And, however 
much we differ as to methods, we all have a common 
purpose — the prosperity of New York. 

As I have listened to-night to the cabinet ministers 
giving their glowing description of the present and fu- 
ture, I have wondered whether the same spirit of the 
occasion afflicted them which did my ministerial neigh- 
bor here, who assured me in the most solemn way that 
there were several members of the Chamber present 
who remembered its original organization, one hundred 
and thirteen years ago. 

My toast calls for an expression of opinion as to how 
the present and the past commercial prosperity of New 
York may be maintained. It can be maintained by the 
public spirit, enterprise, and energy of the merchants 
of the commonwealth, and principally of this body. If 
I should speak to-night of what the merchants of New 
York have done in their relations to the State, and 
what they have made the State in its relations to the 
country, I should repeat the brightest pages in the his- 
tory of the American Republic. When other interests, 
too conservative to break out, were willing to hold back 
and temporize, it was the merchants of New York who 
defied the Stamp Act and precipitated the Revolution. 
When Washington was going to take command of the 
Continental Army, his first and greatest inspiration and 
welcome came from the merchants of the City of New 
York; and it was they who surrounded him when, at 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. 295 

the climax of his fame, he was inaugurated on the steps 
of the Treasury in this metropolis as the first President 
of the Republic. When the country in the State of 
New York, by three-fourths membership of the State 
Convention, proposed to withhold its assent to the Con- 
stitution of the United States, it was the merchants of 
the City of New York who sent to that Convention 
Alexander Hamilton, Chancellor Livingston, and John 
Jay, who, by their matchless eloquence and patriotism, 
won over the adverse majority, and secured the assent 
of the Empire State to the confederation of the United 
States; because the commercial instincts of the me- 
tropolis behind them recognized the grand fact, that 
only in the formation and preservation of the Union of 
the States was the true growth of this State, and the 
possibility of this city becoming the metropolis of the 
Republic. 

The merchants of the City of New York, as a class, 
are siii generis. You neyer think of naming them in the 
same connection with the merchants of rival ports, who 
are striving to take away our commerce. Formulate 
an ideal, for a moment, of these various merchants. 
There is the Baltimore merchant: you picture him as 
a man who is rejoicing to-day over discoveries utilized 
and discarded by us twenty years ago. Take the Phila- 
delphia merchant : your ideal of a gentleman who has, 
late in life, graduated from a retail into a wholesale 
store, and who looks for release in a Heaven where only 
retailers exist. Take the Boston merchant : he is a 
gentleman who is seeking to secure, as his ultimate 
ambition, a position sufficiently eminent at home to be 
invited into a partnership with a New York firm. But, 



296 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

wherever commerce reaches or trade extends — wherever 
the electric telegraph and the rail bring together the 
minds and the products of communities, of states, and 
of nations — the synonym of enterprise and power is the 
merchant of the City of New York. Now, gentlemen, 
New York owes its supremacy to, and will maintain 
its supremacy by, its commercial integrity and thrift. 
While the Puritan in the East, and the Cavalier at the 
South, wrested their lands by force from the aboriginal 
owners, the Dutchman who settled upon Manhattan 
Island, with true commercial integrity, purchased it of 
the Indians for twenty-four dollars. Tradition narrates 
that, with true commercial thrift, at the game of pitch- 
penny he won the money back the next day. Upon 
this broad base of commercial integrity and enterprise 
has been builded the mighty structure which forms the 
commercial, financial, and intellectual center of the 
Republic. 

When De Witt Clinton slept upon his five-ton boat, 
he not only dreamed out the Erie Canal, but in the 
wilderness watered by the Mississippi and Missouri he 
saw the great States of to-day, and he struck through 
the only natural route in the great mountain chain 
which forms the backbone of the continent that artery 
of communication which has illustrated for the State 
of New York the fact, known to historical students for all 
time, that along the highways of commerce and travel 
are to be found civilization, population, power, and 
wealth. For twenty-five years that ditch dug by Clin- 
ton gave to New York a monopoly of the internal com- 
merce of the land ; but the result of that great work 
was to fringe with people only the shores of the lakes 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. 297 

and the ocean front. It took eighteen hundred years 
of civiHzation, eighteen hundred years of effort, before 
the inventive genius of man and the providence of 
God developed a system which should reach out from 
the water-ways, and send population into the distant 
prairies ; which could radiate from the shores and river 
banks, and carry settlements into the interior; which 
could develop remote places, and convey their prod- 
ucts to central reservoirs; which could make possi- 
ble rich and prosperous communities far from naviga- 
ble streams— that was the railroad. This it was that 
brought the sea at Philadelphia one hundred or two 
hundred miles nearer the great West and Southwest ; 
brought Boston into intimate communication with the 
same territory. And yet, notwithstanding all this, New 
York to-day retains absolute supremacy of the internal 
trade of this continent. "All roads lead to Rome," is a 
sentiment two thousand years old ; but Rome is dead, 
and other capitals of ancient and modern times have 
sunk into oblivion, because all roads lead to Rome only 
so long as the trunk lines of the metropolis compel them 
to go there. The great preservative of the prosperity of 
this Republic, of the grandeur of this State, of the con- 
tinued supremacy of this metropolis, is cheap transpor- 
tation. The railroad mind, within the last ten years, 
has changed, and the commercial mind has changed 
with it, and we reach almost the paradox that the 
cheaper the carriage the greater the profit, both to the 
railroad and the shipper. It is the enormous produc- 
tion from the vast acreage brought under cultivation, 
and the enormous volume of business, that make pos- 
sible this result. They have forced freights, in ten years, 



298 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

from two and one-half to three-quarters of a cent a ton 
a mile. When Hendrik Hudson sailed up this great 
river, he was overwhelmed by the ridicule of his com- 
patriots, because he failed to discover the Northwest 
passage to India; but could he have looked forward 
less than two centuries, he would have seen commer- 
cial enterprise make the river which bears his name 
the great highway of commerce between India and the 
West. New York can sustain and maintain her com- 
mercial supremacy by being true to herself, true to the 
elements which have made her what she is — broad, 
liberal, and national, and not narrow or sectional. 

The genius of the preceding generation gave her a 
water-way which made her what she is. The enter- 
prise and foresight of the present should make that 
water-way, by freedom and enlargement, equal to the 
demands of the time. And, doing that, the State 
should treat its other great transportation interest in a 
broad and liberal spirit. It should permit its railroads 
to supplement the work of the canals, in compelling all 
trunk lines to end at the City of New York. Already 
the Grand Trunk, which feeds Boston, is struggling 
with all her might to come to this city. Already the 
railroad which makes Baltimore what she is, is putting 
forth every effort to reach the sea here. Already the 
Pennsylvania road, whose objective point was Philadel- 
phia, has its greatest terminal facilities upon this bay. 
And while Pennsylvania has her railroad, while Mary- 
land has her railroad, while Boston, Montreal, and Can- 
ada rely on the Grand Trunk and the Welland Canal, 
New York, with her canals and system of railroads, can, 
by reasonable foresight and enterprise, preserve her 



CHA UNCE V M. DEPE W. 299 

prominence, notwithstanding all these efforts to take 
away her supremacy. 

Why, gentlemen, within the last ten years we have 
turned the tide of trade and changed the commerce of 
the world. Formerly we were continually in debt to 
Europe, but now the products of our Western soil have 
turned the tide, so that three hundred millions of gold 
a year roll into our country for our manufacturers, mer- 
chants, and farmers. New York must be the distribut- 
ing center of this inflowing stream of wealth. The 
commerce of the East, through the Golden Gate at 
San Francisco ; the commerce of the West, from Chicago 
and St. Louis ; the commerce from beyond the Atlan- 
tic — all should come to New York for handling and dis- 
tribution. How is it to be done? We must be equal to 
the demands of the present, and forget the barbarism 
of the past. While Canada has its enlarged channel, 
while cheap transportation is encouraged and practiced 
everywhere, New York City should get beyond her 
youth. The terminal charge of three cents a hundred 
at this port is a disgrace. Instead of hampering and 
burdening commerce to produce a miserable revenue 
of two hundred thousand or three hundred thousand 
dollars a year by exorbitant wharf and pier rentals, the 
grand water-front around this city should be developed, 
and covered with piers and bulkheads, to welcome, 
without cost, the trade of the world. The harbor mas- 
ter, the port warden, the health officer, the pilots, are 
compelled to measure their necessities by the needs 
of our commerce. (A voice : "Where would our ships 
come from?") From the cheapest market. If we 
have not sufficient enterprise to build ships, it is the 



3°^ OR A TIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

dark ages that prevent us from buying them. In old 
times the granaries of the world were owned by its 
fighting nations, and yet we, to-day, have the granary 
of the world ; and China, with her ironclads, could shut 
up the Pacific Coast, and Spain, a tenth-rate power of 
Europe, blockade every port on the Atlantic. It is a 
shame and disgrace to the American people that we 
have neither navy nor armaments to meet such emer- 
gencies. 

Gentlemen, you, as members of this historic associa- 
tion, can create public sentiment and promote public 
spirit. Parties and politicians will listen and follow 
your advice if you are thoroughly in earnest. You can 
so order it that port charges will no longer threaten the 
prosperity of our commerce, nor the streets of New 
York the health of her inhabitants. 

And now, if I may be permitted, without exciting 
undue apprehension, I will close my remarks with one 
word — Monopoly. Give to New York the monopoly of 
the internal trade of this Republic, and Ohio may have 
the monopoly of its Presidents. 



CHA UNCE Y M. DEPE W. 30 i 



XX. 

SPEECH AT THE BANQUET GiVEN BY THE REPUBLI. 
CAN Club of the City of New York, at Del- 
MONico's, February 12, 1887, in Response to 
THE Sentiment, "The Young Men in Politics." 

I AM glad these toasts are beginning to assume some 
relation to the gentlemen who are to respond to them. 
When Senator Hawley, whose sentiment was "Lincoln," 
started off with mine of "The Young Men in Politics," 
and Senator Hiscock took up Governor Foraker's sub- 
ject, "The Republican Party," and Foraker started out 
on Hiscock's demesne, "The Empire State," I began to 
think the honored guests had been exchanging speeches, 
and became alarmed about my own. Governor Haw- 
ley eloquently remarked that it was the greatest of dis- 
tinctions to be a private when everybody was a titled 
ofificer. Then I am the most distinguished man upon 
this platform, for all the other gentlemen but myself are 
governors, senators, or generals. I have found during 
the evening that conversation was impossible, because 
if I began a question, "Governor," the answer came in 
chorus from the dozen of them about me. I was re- 
cently in a Southern city and the landlord said to me : 
"Colonel Depew, if you desire recognition in this town, 
and to bridge over the bloody chasm, always remember 
that every citizen is either a general or a judge." 



302 ORA TIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

The youthful vigor of the Republican Party was never 
better shown than in the vigorous and magnetic elo- 
quence which has electrified us to-night. It has been 
worthy of the most heroic period and most inspiring 
achievements of the grand old party. It is impossible 
for me to voice the encouragement and hope which 
come to us whose lot is cast in a district where the 
enemy beat us nine times and count us out the tenth, 
when we listen to the aggressive eloquence from you 
gentlemen of the West, who win nine times, and the 
tenth get there just the same. 

It has always been the custom in companies of vet- 
eran politicians to call upon "callow youth," with its 
want of opportunity and experience, to speak for the 
young men in politics. In this instance and upon this 
line the selection has been well made. I see about me 
gentlemen who were famous twenty-five years ago, and 
the time required prior to that to reach their then high 
positions, no man living remembers. I have always 
found that when a life-long office-holder loses the con- 
fidence of his constituency, or exhausts the patience 
or generosity of the appointing power, he at once 
violently projects to the front the bald and frosted pate 
and calls upon the young men of the State to rally for 
the reform of the party. 

What is age? What is youth? They are purely rela- 
tive terms. It is not a question of years, but of grip. 
The college professor of forty who despairs of the party 
and votes with the enemy is fifty years older than Han- 
nibal Hamlin at eighty, who dispenses with an overcoat. 
The hot and turbulent blood of early manhood forces 
the pace so rapidly that it is necessary to put on the 



CHA UNCE V M. DEPE W. 303 

brakes, but when middle life is passed, the man who re- 
sists most successfully the waste of declining years, the 
mdolence which comes from comfortable positions, the 
temptations for ease and for pleasure, and who, with all 
his powers, keeps himself vigorously, actively, and in- 
dustriously alert and abreast with the living issues, 
questions, and controversies of the day, carries with him' 
longest the bloom and the efflorescence of youth. The 
two men who are the most important factors in the 
destinies of peoples and in the politics of nations, are 
Bismarck at seventy-two and Gladstone at seventy- 
eight. 

There are crises in the history of every great people 
when conservatism is a convertible name for treason ; 
when the lines of old party associations and affiliations 
are the boundaries of the dungeon; and when fidelity 
to ancient principles and precedents creates the condi- 
tions of an inquisitorial torture which leads to certain 
death. Twice only in the history of this people have 
these conditions existed, and each time they have led 
to a union of the young men of the country, and to the 
projection into the foremost ranks of politics and of 
statesmanship of the young men of the nation— namely, 
in the Revolutionary party of 'j6 and the Republican 
party of '56. The one struck out first for republican 
government, and then for independence and nationality. 
The other struck first for the union of the States, and 
then for the union of the States only upon the basis of 
universal liberty and the equality of all men before the 
law. 

If the nation would remain free, its young men must 
be the most important factors in its politics and its par- 



304 ORA TIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

ties. They alone possess the element which overturns 
rings and upsets combinations and all other artificial 
creations for the suppression of popular sentiment. 
They alone possess that quality so necessary at times 
where audacity leads caution, and imagination and en- 
thusiasm command judgment. The day that marks 
such a distaste for politics and public life, such a disap- 
pearance of activity in the affairs of the State and of 
the Government, as will make it bad form and unpopu- 
lar for young men to be active, will mark the decadence 
to be followed by the overthrow of the liberties of the 
country. 

Tens of thousands of young men stand every year 
upon the threshold of manhood, and must make their 
choice of the parties with which they shall cast their 
lots and activities. The elements which win them are 
the traditions and inspirations of the past and the prom- 
ise of the future. 

The Democratic party presents nothing in the past 
thirty years of its existence to inspire the imagination, 
to appeal to the enthusiasm, or to warm the patriot- 
ism of youth. The ingenuous young voter looks back 
among the public men of that organization to find that, 
while they were able statesmen, the conditions of their 
position, the necessities of their organization, the fright- 
ful results of their affiliations, compelled them to be 
eternally the drags upon the wheels of progress and a 
hindrance to the development of the prosperity and the 
moral influences of the country. They had necessarily 
to seek to thwart and defeat the party of progress, and 
so they were always years behind the sentiments, the 
needs, and the aspirations of the people. He looks over 



CHA UiVCE V M. DEPE W. jOg 

their public declarations and finds their speeches an 
arid waste, in which the dry bones of previous conditions 
are rattled over and over again — bones belonging to the 
principles which had been buried by the Civil War ten 
thousand feet below the surface of the earth. 

He turns, on the other hand, to the Republican par- 
ty, and he learns that it was born in the inspiring senti- 
ments of free soil and free men. He studies the his- 
tory of its founders, and finds that most of them lived 
up to within the period when he could know something 
personally of their greatness and participate in the 
national mourning at their demise. There stands be- 
fore him that rough, strong, grand figure, whose rise 
from among the people, whose great heart, great mind, 
character, and achievements had made for him the first 
and most enduring fame among the statesmen of his 
generation — Abraham Lincoln. He looks for construc- 
tive statesmanship which can create in national exigen- 
cies out of bankruptcy, of lost credit, the means for carry- 
ing on great and expensive warfare, and there looms up 
the figure of Salmon P. Chase. He finds that the 
hands of the Republic were tied by civil war; that the 
monarchies and despotism of the Old World were plot- 
ting for the overthrow of the Republic and the destruc- 
tion of liberty on this side, which reacted on the other; 
and he reads of the brilliant diplomacy, the successful 
leadership, and the wonderful acquirements of William 
H. Seward. He naturally turns to the halls of Con- 
gress, and there discovers the tribune of the people, who 
voiced in most eloquent and enduring language the 
moral sentiment for which men were sacrificing their 
lives upon the battlefield — in Charles Sumner. His in- 



30^ OUA TIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

quiries as to the military glory of the Republic are at 
once confronted with the history of that great soldier 
who commanded the largest armies and won the most 
victories fought in the greatest cause of modern times- 
General Grant. 

But the past alone will not retain his allegiance or 
keep his vote. The surging elements of our industrial 
and material conditions form the sea upon which he 
must find the ship that can carry him to prosperity and 
to safety. He looks out for that organization which is 
constructive and creative; which can understand the 
needs of sixty millions of people and legislate for their 
wants. If he finds no organization equal to this great 
task and trust, then the young men of the country will 
unite and form one. But the Republican party has 
always been, and is to-day, the only organization which 
puts into the practical form of legislation the principles 
that develop and promote American industry and care for 
American labor. It is not enough, however, that Ameri- 
can industry should be protected ; that the conditions 
should be created where capital can safely be invested 
in mines, in factories, and in mills; but that some party 
either exists or will be created which can solve so suc- 
cessfully the distribution of wealth, the responsibilities 
of capital, the remunerative employment of labor, as to 
bring about in all the great industrial centers of the 
land harmonious relations between the employers and 
employees, and prosperous and happy conditions for all 
classes of workers. 

There is a young man in politics who now occupies 
the exalted position of President of the United States. 
He is not yet recovered from one of the delusions oi 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEVV. 307 

young Democratic politicians, that the fulfiHment of the 
roseate and reform promises of the campaign necessar- 
ily loses him the confidence of his party. He finds that 
just in proportion as he attempts to solve the question 
of revenue and tariff, upon which depend prosperity 
and employment, does he offend one section of his 
party; just in proportion as he reaches sound positions 
upon currency and finance does he alienate another por- 
tion of his party; and when he carries into practice the 
Civil Service promises which the Mugwumpian reform 
placed so acutely in his letter of acceptance and plat- 
form, does he find himself deserted by the whole of his 
party. So that, as he loyally rises to the highest and 
best conditions of his early promises and hopes, does 
he become the most lonesome statesman in America. 

I remember that I was once a pall-bearer at the 
funeral of one of the leading citizens of Pcckskill. 
Noticing that the carriage was plunging wildly and 
likely to upset, I looked out and saw that the horse 
attached to the hearse was running away and galloping 
across lots, while we were in reckless pursuit. I called 
to the driver to hold up, but he only answered, as he 
gave his team the lash: "Mr. Depew, you were born in 
Peekskill, and you ought to remember that it is the 
custom in this town for the mourners to follow the 
hearse." While the Democratic hearse is being frantic- 
ally driven now in the woods, now in the open, and 
now on the road, to suit every condition of grief there 
may be behind, the Republican procession moves grand- 
ly forward in harmonious columns and with equal step 
along the broad highway toward better government 
for the nation and freer and happier lives for the people. 



3o8 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

Well, gentlemen, the Republican party have not now 
the responsibilities of power. They will secure them 
only through the aid of the generous and ingenuous 
youth who this year and next year are to become the 
first voters of the country. They are coming from the 
fields, the workshops, and colleges, and they will be 
found in the ranks of our party of progress. The past 
of the party is absolutely secure. The present of the 
party is fully abreast of the needs and aspirations of 
the people. In the future of the party I hope for suc- 
cess in 1888, when the grand old organization, resum- 
ing the government of the country, which it so admira- 
bly administered for a quarter of a century, will for 
another equal period exhibit in the administration of 
affairs its unrivaled genius for promoting the develop- 
ment, the prosperity, and the liberty of the Republic. 



CHA UNCE Y M. DEPE W. 309 



S 



XXI. 

PEECH AT THE LOTOS CLUB'S RECEPTION TO 

Henry M. Stanley, November 27, 1886. 



Mr. President and Gentlemen of the Lotos 
Club: 

I have never felt so much the cares of railroading as 
I do to-night. From early youth I have been reading 
and admiring and wondering at the words and works of 
Stanley and Reid and "Gath" ! Yet I find them here 
to-night with flowing heads of jet-black hair and jet- 
black mustaches, while I have a polished sconce and 
silvered side-whiskers. Now I want to know where 
journalism gets its dye. If it is brandy and soda, then 
that is my beverage forevermore. 

I never appreciated so fully before the privilege of 
being a member of the Lotos Club. I see in an even- 
ing paper, in an interview to which Stanley subjected 
himself, that he intended to give fifty-two lectures at 
$250 apiece. Yet for the ordinary price of a Lotos 
dinner we have had the lecture for nothing— and thus 
we gather them in. 

It affords me very great pleasure to join in this wel- 
come to-night to the great explorer. He is more than 
an explorer, he is a great artist, for he has presented to 
us those magnificent word-pictures, which will endure 
forever, of the romance and reality of the Dark Conti- 



3IO ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

nent. It is seldom that the American people, isolated 
as they are from the politics and complications of for- 
eign nations, have an opportunity to greet a hero of 
their own land, who has become such on account of his 
achievements in other continents. But the bloodless 
victories of Stanley will outlive many of the bloody 
battles which form the staple of history. Rome wel- 
comed her conquerors returning with the spoils of 
nations with triumphal processions and memorial arches. 
We, more practical, receive them with a banquet at the 
Lotos Club. 

But the gathering here simply expresses in condensed 
form the feeling which will find universal expression all 
over the United States. We are a nation of travelers, 
and as such are glad to meet and to honor one who is 
by right the chief of our order. No people have ever 
existed who move so much, so far, and so rapidly as 
Americans. They are constantly finding pretexts, or 
acting Mathout pretexts, to take advantage of steam upon 
the rail or upon the water to annihilate distance and 
to accomplish results. This nomadic instinct has sent 
them all over the world, to bring back new opportuni- 
ties for an increase of our commercial life, to bring back 
the results of old civilization for our culture in art and 
in our education in every direction. It has led the way 
to the peopling of our prairies and to the discovery of 
our untold mineral wealth. The development of this 
instinct is the solace of the railroad stockholder of to- 
day and his hope for the future. 

Every man who has ever in his own person sounded 
the capacities of the reporter for an interview, for the 
representation of his personal experience and character- 



CHA UNCE Y M. DEPE W. 311 

istics, for a report of the things which he never said 
will join in this greeting, in the fond hope that the 
world-wide fame and magnificent achievements of Stan- 
ley will inspire all his brother reporters to become 
explorers. His hope is, that, as a result of this tes- 
timonial, the reporters will be exploring the wilds of 
Africa, the forest and swamps of South America, or float- 
ing down the yet unnamed rivers of Alaska. The world 
in all ages has worshiped its heroes, but the standard of 
heroism has always been improving. Among the best 
examples of the heroism of to-day, after all, are the 
things that have been done by reporters. They take 
risks and incur hazards which none others dare, and 
without any of the incentives which inspire others to 
their actions. While the soldier mounts to magnifi- 
cent heights of courage and daring when the savage in 
him is developed by the blood of the conflict, the re- 
porters calmly stand beside him noting the incidents of 
the tragedy, and riding afterward for miles through a 
hostile country alone to reach the telegraph office and 
flash it to the world. I know American reporters in 
Europe, who, a year ago, during the prevalence of the 
cholera, when even the medical staff dared not eo. en- 
tered Toulon, stood in its pest-houses, walked its hos- 
pitals, nursed its sick, and buried its dead, simply that 
they might be able to give a true account to the world 
of the plague-besieged city. 

We reckon heroism to-day, not so much on account 
of the thing done, as for the motive behind the act. It 
is not the destroyers of mankind or of nations who will 
live in the affections of the present or of future gen- 
erations, but their benefactors. Livingston is sure of 



312 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

immortality, though he was but an humble mission- 
ary, because he endured and suffered everything that 
he might elevate a whole race to civilization and to 
Christianity. This unselfish devotion secured for him 
the love and admiration of the world, and when he was 
lost, civilization felt that a brother was in trouble who 
must be relieved. At this supreme moment the re- 
porter, Henry M. Stanley, with no other motive than to 
restore the hero Livingston to the world, undertook all 
the perils of travel in the African jungles. The result of 
that expedition made his name one that will never die. 

There is nothing so fascinating in the whole realm 
of literature as the incidents, the accidents, and the 
adventures of travel. The brightest pages in the recol- 
lection of every man are the nights and days which he 
gave to the tales of travelers of ancient and of modern 
times. While we remember their stories, how few 
of their names survive. There is always a latent sus- 
picion that the traveler may not have seen all that 
he describes, and may not have experienced all the 
adventures with which he thrills us. Notwithstanding 
this, I have known people who have believed that all 
the marvelous things so brilliantly and charmingly put 
forth by Colonel Knox in his "Boy Travelers" are remi- 
niscences of his personal experience. It is one of the 
elements of hopefulness in this world, that, notwith- 
standing the existence of such people, progress is not 
retarded. 

But Stanley will own his claim upon the present and 
the future, not to his merit as a story-teller, but to the 
substantial contributions he has made to the welfare of 
mankind. Any man who has calmly studied the social 



CHA UNCE V M. DEPE W. 313 

and industrial conditions of Europe cannot but be 
appalled at the prospect, unless there be some outlet 
for its overcrowded population. Otherwise the future 
must witness the constant accumulation of dangers 
threatening both the state and society. But in the dis- 
covery of the possibilities of the interior of Africa, the 
climatic conditions of its different plateaus, the fertility 
of its valleys, and the wealth of its immense forests, 
Stanley has presented to civilization a safety-valve. 
When commerce has opened up its navigable rivers 
and laid the railroad across its plains, population will 
follow to build thriving and wealthy states in regions 
inhabited now only by wild tribes. The Africa of the 
future will add enormously to the wealth of the world 
and the happiness of the human race. It may become 
the seat of capitals and empires which, like Carthage, 
will illumine the world. It is not at all impossible or 
improbable that in the distant future Stanley may be 
to the African people what Columbus is to the inhabi- 
tants of America. It is neither improbable nor impos- 
sible that Germans, Englishmen, Scotchmen, Irishmen, 
Frenchmen, Italians, and Spaniards, who have built 
up in Africa powerful and prosperous nations, shall look 
back with gratitude to the man whose intrepidity 
opened up these opportunities for settlement and civili- 
zation. 



314 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 



S 



XXII. 

PEECH AT Lotos Club Reception to George 
Augustus Sala, January io, 1885. 



Mr. President and Gentlemen: 

Nothing pleases and compliments me more than to 
be called upon on this occasion to speak by my fellow 
extinct Senator. When, in Dublin last summer, an Irish 
orator was dilating upon an opponent who, he said, pos- 
sessed all the characteristics of an extinct volcano, one 
of the audience yelled out "Poor cratur." As this oc- 
casion seems to be turned somewhat from a social to a 
political discussion, it pleases me to find that the repre- 
sentative newspaper of America, which has been for 
months my personal organ, is here to-night in the per- 
son of Mr. Pulitzer. The public may not understand 
this thing, but Pulitzer and I do; and I am always 
pleased that while Mr. Reid represents the Blaine ele- 
ment, which would have succeeded but for certain 
unforeseen accidents, and Mr. Pulitzer, both in his Con- 
gressional record and as the representative of a party 
newspaper, represents the party which did succeed, — 
that the secretary supplemented the full round of the 
political horizon by reading the letters of those most 
distinguished Mugwumps, George William Curtis and 
Henry Ward Beecher. And after having seen and 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. 315 

heard from our guest of to-night his reply to the presi- 
dent, no one can doubt where his sympathies are. 

I have noticed that after some of the jocose remarks 
of the eminent wits who have preceded me, they have 
introduced some of the most witty parts of their obser- 
vations by saying "now to be serious." I have thought 
as I have sat here at this table to-night, what a congre- 
gation it would be if all the eminent men who have been 
received by the Lotos Club were gathered in one room ; 
it would be an intellectual kaleidoscope that at every 
turn would illustrate and present the best form of gen- 
ius. We have received here those men w^ho, in letters, 
in arms, and in statesmanship, have illustrated all that 
is greatest and grandest of our time in this and other 
countries. At the same time, by sundry accidents which 
happen in clubs like this, as well as in politics, we have 
received gentlemen who have culminated at this recep- 
tion and never been heard of after. And the receptions 
which have marked our history would illustrate the 
manner in which, in one sense, the country which our 
guest represents sought to capture this great and grow- 
ing empire. When that gentleman whom Macaulay 
alludes to as sitting upon the broken arch of London 
Bridge has become tired of his reflections and come 
over here for grander and larger ones, swinging upon 
the broken string of the Brooklyn Bridge to muse upon 
what has been and might be, his thoughts will recur to 
the efforts, continuously made and partly successful, of 
the mother-country to capture and control her wayward 
child on this side of the Atlantic. She began at the 
beginning by attempting to wallop us, and made that 
discovery which many a parent has made before, M'hen 



3i6 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

the child has gone forth into the world and become in- 
dependent and self-reliant — that he returns not a boy, 
but a full-grown man. Since that time, for a hundred 
years, by diplomacy and by other art, England has 
endeavored to make this great empire the tail of the 
British kite. 

Now, we have been able to resist her armies and her 
navies, but she has captured us in the sense that she 
does all our carrying trade, and tolls us for a whole of 
the profit. She has captured us in the sense that our 
best society speaks with a dialect of the noble language 
which is called English. But while we could resist her 
armies and her navies, while we could withstand the 
metrical and musical assaults of her Sullivans and of 
her Gilberts, there is a point where we feel that there 
is a necessity of not surrendering — that is, when the 
British lecturer appears. A modern Briton, when he 
feels that he has a mission to reveal to the world, goes 
out, not to the country which needs it most — his own — 
but comes over here, and in the spirit of the purest, 
philanthropy lets us have it at two hundred dollars a 
night. And that is the reason why Mr. Sala, notwith- 
standing his modest declaimer that he is a traveler, 
sojourning through the land, goes to San Francisco by 
way of Portland, Maine, and Boston. 

The present commercial difficulties in this country — 
lack of prosperity, the closing of the mills, and all that 
which we are accustomed to ascribe to the fact that a 
Democratic administration has come into power — are 
due to this horde of English lecturers. For, like the 
Chinaman, who comes here to accumulate and not to 
stay, he carries away with him all our surplus and 



CHA UNCE V M. DEPE W. 317 

leaves nothing but ideas. I well remember, as you do, 
Mr. President, when this system of insidious English 
attack upon our institutions was begun. Thackeray, 
that grand-hearted and genial critic, began it. Dickens, 
with his magnificent dramatic talent, continued it ; and 
then, what we have suffered since ! Look at Serjeant 
Ballantyne, who brought us jokes so old that they 
fell within the provisions of the Penal Act, and 
carried away stories which have since convulsed the 
British Empire. Look at Herbert Spencer the dyspep- 
tic — lean, hungry, sleepless, emaciated, prostrated with 
nervous prostration. He appeared before us, and, look- 
ing for all the word like Pickwick gone to seed, lectured 
us upon over-work. 

Look at Matthew Arnold, that apostle of light and 
sunshine, who came here and had an experience which 
might excite the compassion of all. He found himself 
in that region from which Mr. Pulitzer hails, in the 
midst of what is termed a lecture corpse. The lecture 
manager made this introductory speech : "Ladies and 
Gentlemen : Next week we shall have here those beau- 
tiful singers, the Johnson Sisters. Two weeks from to- 
night Prof. Forcewind will give us magnificent views 
of Europe upon the magic-lantern ; and to-night I have 
the pleasure of introducing to you that distinguished 
philosopher who has passed most of his life in India, 
Matthew Arnold, who is the author of that great poem, 
'The Light of Asia.' " 

Well, now, gentlemen, whatever may be said of the 
previous representatives of the British Empire, we, rep- 
resenting the whole American people, welcome here to- 
night our guest, George Augustus Sala. We welcome 



31 8 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

him because he is of all Englishmen the most like an 
American. He writes editorials which fire people like 
the sound of a trumpet ; he writes books which a man 
may take home to his friends and read to his family 
with perfect satisfaction and without fear of a blush. 
He is the best after-dinner speaker among the English 
people, and equal to most of our American after-din- 
ner speakers. I see that in that interview in which he 
says that he has come here to make money — I was glad 
to see — he refuted the statement that among his lec- 
tures there was one upon "Culture, Costumes, and 
Cookery." I want him to understand, as he traverses 
this continent by way of Boston and Portland to San 
Francisco, that the lecture-going and intelligent people 
of this country will not stand alliteration. A great so- 
cial, religious, moral, and political revolution has been 
wrought in this Republic by Dr. Burchard's famous 
phrase of "Rum, Romanism and Rebellion." 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW 319 



s 



XXII. 

PEECH AT THE LOTOS CLUB'S RECEPTION TO 

Henry Irving, October 27, 1883. 



Mr. President: 

The best criticism that was made upon the speech of 
our guest to-night was, "He talks Hke an American." 
I am sure that this memorable night will be recollected 
from the fact that, in the midst of the din of wars and 
contests and controversies about us, this is simply a 
peaceful tribute on behalf of this club to one of the 
chief and most devoted of the exponents of the drama. 
We have welcomed to this country recently many emi- 
nent Englishmen, and among them Lord Coleridge, 
whom we were glad to see and to honor both for what 
he is and what he represents. We have received, at the 
same time with Mr. Irving, Matthew Arnold, and while 
as a great thinker we give him welcome, we warn him 
that orthodoxy has for him its scalping-knife sharp, and 
that the theological hatchet is thirsting for his gore. 

The whole town is in a din and furore with the oper- 
atic war, and tenors are peeping over high "C's" to get 
at each other, while sopranos are hauled before the 
courts, Mapleson walks around with the chip on his 
shoulder, and Abbey calls upon the police to prevent 
him from hurting somebody. 



320 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

But while this controversy rages we meet here to-night 
with one voice and one accord to welcome the most 
eminent dramatic scenic painter of this century and 
the most eminent English actor of this generation. We 
have welcomed to this board many men from beyond 
the seas, and while they have poured something into 
this vast reservoir of intellectual wealth, we have done 
more for them. Lord Houghton asserts that his health 
and longevity after his reception here were largely due 
to the fact that he learned at this place the way to 
longevity by a cheap and frugal meal. From this 
board Sullivan arose to become a knight. We are all 
of us familiar with the oratory which usually character- 
izes an expression of the relations between the old 
country and the new. There is nothing better known 
in the whole range of eloquence than that which refers 
to the inter-dependent relations in respect to literature 
and science and art between America and England. 
While this chord is familiar, there is one string which 
is not often touched, and that is the debt we owe to 
the English thinkers, Huxley, Tyndall, and Darwin, 
who have created the shibboleth known in all the 
schools of America, that evolution is the great principle 
of modern science. 

While the most of us believe in evolution in theory, 
in practice we have seen it only upon the stage. The 
Englishman, from whom our Yankee inherits commer- 
cial instincts, saw our want and supplied it. First he 
sent to us Lydia Thompson and her troupe. The over- 
flowing houses, the plethoric treasuries, the wild en- 
thusiasm that greeted them, showed that they had 
touched a sympathetic cord in the American anatomy. 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. 32 1 

And then the shrewd EngHshman sent us "Pinafore." 
We were at first fascinated, then charmed, and then 
annihilated. We could stand it for 600 consecutive 
nights in all the theaters to the exclusion of everything 
else; in the parlor, upon the piano, in the school-room, 
on- the hurdy-gurdy and on the hand-organ ; but when 
the church choir could do nothing else, then there rose 
a cry for relief from one end of this country to the 
other. The like of that cry has never been heard since 
the children of Israel sought to escape from Egypt. 
Then, in recognition of his great service, Queen Victoria 
summoned the author to her presence, and said to him : 
"For one hundred years I have sought to subdue those 
children of ours beyond the seas, but without success; 
but for your grand success arise and take your place 
with the knights in armor." 

And when by the natural process of evolution we had 
got beyond that, England, seeing our need, caused to 
beam upon us, like the aurora borealis, Oscar Wilde. 
Not the emasculated Oscar who recently appeared here 
with shorn locks and ready-made clothes, an exceed- 
ingly commonplace young man, but that glorious son 
of the morning, in flowing locks and knickerbocker 
breeches, to whom a friend said : "We have heard your 
mission of the aesthetic and the beautiful which raises 
us to a new and higher atmosphere; but what of Irv- 
ing?" He said: "Ah, Irving! You ought to see his 
legs. They are beautiful. One is sublime, and the 
other is a poem." 

And then, as an oasis in the desert which followed 
his departure, they sent us the "Jersey Lily." But 
now, clothed and in our right minds — now, when we are 



32 2 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

advanced from the chrysalis into the butterfly — devel- 
oped from the savage into the civilized man of the 
nineteenth century — she sends us the guest whom we 
welcome here to-night — the great high-priest of that 
oldest of all arts, which, from the time when Roscius 
taught Cicero down to the present day, has had few 
great exponents within the centuries which marked the 
interval. 

There is nothing which more clearly indicates the 
development of this American people from provincial- 
ism and its bigotry than the welcome given to Ma- 
cready and that which we accord to Irving. To secure 
a hearing for Macready required that the soldiery 
should march with fixed bayonets and loaded guns, 
while the blood of the mob poured through the gutter. 
But now the American people have come to recog- 
nize the fact that to be a great people they must 
adopt that catholicity which embraces men all over 
the world ; that while they may believe in Protection 
for textile fabrics and manufactures, there must be Free 
Trade in genius. 

We hail, with the gladdest acclaim and heartiest wel- 
come, the German Barnay, the Italian Salvini, and the 
English Irving, because we wish to have the best the 
world has of art in any of its departments, and because 
we want to show them that their success is incomplete 
until they have passed the ordeal of American criticism. 
The very best tribute of recent times to the sentiment 
of right-minded men of culture and intelligence on both 
.sides of the Atlantic, notwithstanding what demagogues 
may say, is that a London audience crowded the house 
and rose to the highest enthusiasm to greet the appear- 



CHA UNCE V M. DEPE W, 323 

ance and applaud the acting of the American Edwin 
Booth ; and its counterpart will be the reciprocity mani- 
fested by the American people in crowding the house 
and applauding the acting of Henry Irving. Still, in 
illustration of the same idea, while London renders her 
most generous tribute to the beauty and genius of Mary 
Anderson, we here, with an equal chivalry, will receive 
with our best loyalty that accomplished, charming and 
lovely woman, and brilliant actress, Ellen Terry. 



324 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 



s 



XXIV. 

PEECH AT THE DINNER AT DELMONICO'S TO CEL- 

EBRATE Yale's Victories in Athletic Con- 
tests, February i6, 1889. 



Mr. Chairman and Gentlemen ; 

For the only time in a hundred and eighty-eight 
years, the alumni of Yale meet solely to celebrate her 
athletic triumphs. In all the other attributes of a great 
seat of learning, Yale has been known for a century 
as the first of American colleges. Now that she has 
demonstrated upon so many famous fields her cham- 
pionship in this chief requisite of a modern university, 
we, of the older school, join you, of the younger, in wel- 
coming Hercules into the college faculty. The oldest 
graduate and the youngest are one to-night in the 
charming fellowship which makes them all boys of equal 
age, a joy to each other and a terror to their foes. 

This gathering of four hundred college athletes is the 
argument for athletics. We are the healthiest body of 
men ever seen within these walls, and to-night the hap- 
piest. There can be no greater contrast than between 
the student of thirty years ago and to-day. Dyspep- 
sia is no longer the test of scholarship, and honors are 
not won by shadows. The theology of to-day believes 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. 325 

that there are no antagonisms between spirituality and 
muscularity. The minister who hits sin so hard from 
the pulpit can whip any sinner in the pews. The mod- 
ern student knows that a well-developed body and a 
well-informed mind are necessary partners for intel- 
lectual and material triumphs. The hollow-chested, 
high-honor men of thirty years ago would stand like 
wired skeletons beside the valedictorians and saluta- 
torians, the DeForest medalists and the philosophical 
oration champions, who exhibit splendid physical vigor, 
while winning the prizes under harder conditions and 
with far more advanced standards. The past compared 
with the present reminds me of a compliment which 
paralyzed one of my earlier efforts. I had spoken at a 
great meeting on the Mohawk, and when I closed, a 
leading citizen said : "Chauncey, I have read many of 
your speeches, and traveled miles to-day to hear you, 
and have been greatly entertained by your effort, but 
on reflection it strikes me that your speech this after- 
noon had more frill than shirt." One alumnus to whom 
we are largely indebted for the more vigorous and more 
muscular Yale is Mr. Robert J. Cook. A chapter from 
his own experience shows the continuing value of 
athletics. If President Dwight, or Judge Rowland, or 
I had been at any time in our lives struck on the head 
by an ax wielded by a brawny ruffian, we would have 
folded our arms, smiled with sweet resignation, and 
died. That was the result of the old culture. But 
when a gigantic Negro plunged a hatchet into the head 
of Bob Cook, he seized his assailant, nearly licked the 
life out of him, carried him a prisoner to the police 
station, and then pulled the hatchet out of his brain 



326 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

and sent for a doctor. That is what can be endured 
and done under the new curriculum. 

The entrance of Cook into Yale forms an epoch in 
her history. He will be remembered by future genera- 
tions as one of the founders of the college. In giving 
to boating the enthusiasm of success, he stimulated 
every manly sport. When Yale became triumphant 
with the oar, and the discussion of her stroke filled 
more space in the daily newspaper than the proceed- 
ings of Congress, her navy became a school of physical 
culture. Other colleges became first interested, and 
then active, in the same direction. Baseball and foot- 
ball games experienced a genuine revival, and the deep- 
chested and broad-minded student was born. 

The worthy successor of Cook as a leader in Yale 
athletics has been Pitcher Stagg. He prayed before 
he pitched, and had the manliness to acknowledge it, 
and then he fought the game in the same spirit with 
which Cromwell's Ironsides won Naseby. Exercise in 
solitude and without the stimulus of friendly contest is 
always a failure. The dumb-bell becomes a nuisance, 
and the Indian club a fraud. You get tired of walking, 
and sawing wood somehow loses its attractions. The 
conflicts with Harvard, the defeats so hard to bear, the 
occasional victory so soothing to our wounds, so inspir- 
iting for our future, these made work a pastime, and 
work rightly directed has given Yale the championship 
of America. Venerable axioms are exploded, mechani- 
cal movements of muscles make neither athletes nor 
healthy students. The excited mind must guide the 
procession of the limbs. To force water by a hand- 
pump in the cellar to a tank on the roof is work, to 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEVV. 327 

master the glorious sweep and artistic dip of the oar is 
exercise — and fame. 

Athletics have encouraged manliness and stamped 
out ruffianism. Every healthy youth generates steam 
faster than under ordinary conditions he can work it 
off. In the old days it impelled him to throw bricks 
through the tutors' windows, to crack the college bell, 
to steal signs, and wrench off door-knobs. These di- 
versions taught him contempt for law, and kept him in 
fear of the constable and dangerously near the police 
court. It dulled his sense of honor and left a stain 
upon his character to be exhibited under other condi- 
tions in after-years. If he thought it brilliant to smoke 
out freshmen, to overcome a defenseless student by 
force of numbers, to subject his victim to degrading 
and disgraceful torments and cruel tortures, which 
were often lasting in their disastrous effects, the refin- 
ing influences of education became the veneer of the 
bully and the weapon of the savage. He was rusti- 
cated for rioting and dropped because he had neither a 
disciplined mind nor could submit to discipline. But 
with the bat, the ball, and the oar, with the training of 
the gymnasium, and in the splendid vigor of competi- 
tive sports, came the fire and enthusiasm of the Olym- 
pian games. The hard lesson that the best training and 
the most faithful work alone win the prizes is learned 
under joyous conditions. The page again welcomes 
every hardship that he may bear the armor of the 
knight, and the spirit of chivalry pervades the univer- 
sity. The pent-up forces and the resistless energies of 
the students become the potent agents for physical de- 
velopment and mental discipline, and for the growth of 



328 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

moral and intellectual health. Such men hail difficul- 
ties with ardor and overcome them with ease. They 
love work because of the pleasure in the mastery and 
the movement of the perfect machinery which wins the 
game or elucidates the problem. The school of unruly 
boys becomes a university of active, thoughtful, and 
self-reliant gentlemen. The requirements for admis- 
sion are constantly increasing, and the standard for 
graduation is perpetually rising. Except for the dis- 
ciplined and obedient mind which comes from the train- 
ing of the athlete, it would be hard to meet the condi- 
tions of the curriculum within proper years. Already 
practical men are becoming alarmed for fear the advanc- 
ing demands of the college courses may keep a man an 
undergraduate so long, and launch him into his life-work 
so late, that he can neither catch up nor compete with 
those who came younger into the field. 

This year marks not only the cycles of uninterrupted 
successes in the field, but will be remembered for the 
triumphs of Yale in the arena of national politics. 
Thirty years ago the old college graduated a young 
citizen of Delaware, and returned him to his State 
equipped for a life-and-death struggle with feudal con- 
ditions and hereditary power. With rare courage and 
masterly ability he began the unequal and hopeless bat- 
tle. But with the indomitable spirit born of Yale, 
and the weapons forged in her furnaces, he made 
breaches in the walls of caste and prejudice, and revolu- 
tionized the commonwealth. To-day Delaware catches 
the step of progress and marches abreast the times under 
the leadership of Senator Anthony Higgins. Colorado 
felt the impulse of national aspirations and the need of 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEIV. 329 

the laiger influence commanding eloquence and states- 
manship. She found in Yale the voice which had cap- 
tured the country by a single speech, and a new era of 
brilliant promise opens for her through the genius of 
Senator Edward Wolcott. 

Old Yale was never so dear to her children and never 
more merited their affection than now. We are proud 
of her progress and rejoice in her conservatism. She 
has the courage to wait, and does not tempt Providence 
until she has proved the experiment. She never for- 
gets that the object of her efforts is to fit and train young 
men for work in an industrial republic, and the highest 
testimony to her methods is the success of her sons in 
every department of energy and thought. 



330 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 



XXV. 

ADDRESS AS Chairman of the Alumni Meeting, 
IN Alumni Hall, Yale College, at the Com- 
mencement, June 25, 1886. 



Gentlemen of the Alumni and Ladies: 

I find that thirty years out of college do not impair 
the enjoyment of academical honors. The feelings of 
an undergraduate who has just received the De Forest 
Medal are the sentiments with which I return you my 
thanks for this high honor. For many years I have 
wondered upon what principle the President of the 
Alumni of this college was selected, and have suspected 
at times that the machine methods which control politi- 
cal parties were practiced in these canvasses ; but the 
closer contact, the more rigid examination, and the satis- 
factory result of to-day, have convinced me that there 
is the freest expression of the popular will. 

We meet here on this anniversary under peculiar con- 
ditions. Criticism and change confront us. The past 
year has been fruitful in charges against, and attack upon, 
the University. The shouts of the assailants have filled 
the land with noise. They say the institution is bigot- 
edly conservative ; is unequal to the demands of the 
times; does not keep abreast with educational develop- 
ment, and is religious, Precisely in what it fails to 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. ^^x 

meet every requirements of learning they do not state. 
They do not deny that its standard of scholarship is 
higher than any of its rivals, but claim that somehow 
the standard is defective. Unless we admit at the out- 
set that education and religious teachings and require- 
ments are incompatible, it is impossible to find out what 
is the difficulty. The critics among us would tear 
down the old, would wipe out the traditions and ex- 
perience of the past, but they offer nothing to replace 
them. The constructive talent is indeed rare, but be- 
fore we part with this glorious result of two hundred 
years of magnificent achievement and progress, we must 
be sure of the future. The disciples of the New Learn- 
ing, whatever it may be, must furnish us not only the 
material of their edifice, but the designs of its architects 
and every detail of its equipment. I believe that the 
great body of the Alumni are in a state of serene satis- 
faction with the old college, and that the apparent ex- 
citement and distrust can be accounted for upon the 
familiar experience that one harvest will break up a 
camp-meeting. But the preacher continues, and the 
good work goes on. The temporary exasperation of 
the article, or the fear of it, does not reach fundamen- 
tal doctrines or disturb the foundations of faith. We be- 
lieve that Yale should remain a Christian college. The 
prayers which the student cannot escape, the chapel, or 
the church of his parents which he must attend, the un- 
derlying and vital principles of Christianity which he 
must understand, may bear little or no fruit; they cer- 
tainly can do no harm. In the vast majority of cases 
they have kept the boy right, through manhood and 
old age, have saved him in times of peril and tempta- 



332 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

tion, or have rescued him after crime and despair be- 
fore he was wholly lost. 

The New Learning proclaims another Declaration of 
Independence for youth. The callow judgment of the 
boy under twenty is better for his needs, than the ex- 
perience of the learned Faculty, who have given their 
lives to teaching. Curriculums, uniform courses of 
study, classics, philosophies, and mathematics for men- 
tal discipline, were well enough in the infancy of the 
race, but wholly unf^t for the present development of 
the mind. Study only those things which can be made 
immediately useful in trade or the professions, and 
trust the student to elect. Yale repudiates the whole 
scheme. She broadly cultures her sons, believing that 
men learned in the literature and languages of the 
ancients, as well as the moderns whose souls are satu- 
rated with the thoughts and spirit of the ages, and 
whose minds are multifariously trained, will soonest 
acquire and better follow their life vocations. She has 
faith that wherever their lots may be cast they will be 
the leaders in all that promotes the public welfare, and 
surpass the specialists in their specialities. 

It is the distinction of Yale that within her walls 
neither scholastic nor student honors are influenced by 
pedigree or purse. We are not located in or so near 
a large city that its social and moral influences domi- 
nate our college life, nor so entirely in the country as to 
insensibly acquire provincialisms of the neighborhood, 
which make it difficult to assimilate with any and every 
community. The University is most happily situated 
in a city which presents in the best forms the most 
perfect results of urban culture, refinement, and civiliza- 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. 333 

tion, and yet from its size and numbers can only be to 
the students an example, but not a force. The young 
men who come here from every State and Territory, and 
of every creed and faith, form among themselves a stu- 
dent republic, like that of Abelard in the Middle Ages. 
It has its own politics and public opinions, and its stand- 
ards are manhood and intellect. That curse of col- 
legiate life, large allowances by injudicious parents, 
and a rivalry in extravagant expenditures by their sons, 
which through riot and dissipation surely end in their 
ruin and the demoralization of their associates, is not 
possible in their University. The controlling element 
of their student democracy is the serious business of 
preparation for a career, and there can be neither place 
nor recognition for the spendthrift or the prodigal. 

While we are assembling under these old elms the 
world is ringing with the clamor of two of the most far- 
reaching agitations of the century: the greatest of liv- 
ing statesmen and parliamentary leaders is appealing to 
his countrymen to empower him to redress the wrongs 
of centuries, by granting self-government in their own 
affairs to a long-suffering and generous people. For 
the first time in history, the politics of our nation have 
become the concern of all civilized communities, and 
the speech of Gladstone for the freedom of Ireland, 
which arouses the enthusiasm of his Edinburgh audi- 
ence, following the wires over the earth and flashed 
through cables under the seas, receives responsive ap- 
plause from every people which possesses and knows 
the blessings of liberty. His marvelous success is the 
best living tribute to a rigid university curriculum and 
a classical education. May the wonderful career of 



334 ORA TIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

the grand old man be crowned with triumph in this tho> 
final and most fruitful and beneficent effort of his life. 
But the second great event, and that in which we are 
more immediately interested, is the filling of the va- 
cancy in the Corporation of Yale College. The plat- 
forms and pronunciamentos of the candidates have 
filled the newspapers and burdened the mails. In point 
and precision, in modest statement and glowing prom- 
ises, they take equal rank with contemporaneous elec- 
tion circulars of Gladstone and Salisbury, of Parnell 
and Hartington, of Chamberlain and Churchill. Each 
of them says that this serious call of duty has come to 
him at a time when acceptance of the place involves 
the greatest sacrifices; but he is prepared to make 
them. He knows of no personal or private interest 
which can stand in the way, when the welfare of Alma 
Mater needs his services. It is with profoundest satis- 
faction that we hail this martyr spirit. It shows that, 
notwithstanding the gross materialism of our times, 
the voyage of the Mayflower was not made in vain, and 
that the sons of Yale are always ready to pledge their 
"lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor" to the 
public service. 

We perform on this occasion a duty which rarely falls 
to the lot of the alumnus of Yale. We are to bid 
"hail and farewell" to the incoming and the retiring 
Presidents. Elections seldom occur in our University, 
and the Executive has always voluntarily laid down the 
cares of his high office and carried with him to well- 
earned rest the heartfelt regrets of his constituents. 
There have been only four changes in nearly a century. 
The past hundred years are remarkable for the redu- 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. 335 

plication of forces, and the enormous development of 
wealth by the utih'zation of steam and electricity and 
the results of inventive genius, but the march of the 
mmd has kept pace with material progress, and the in- 
stitutions of learning are still in the lead. There have 
been no more important factors in this activity than 
Jeremiah Day, Timothy Dwight, Theodore D. Woolsey 
and Noah Porter, Yale's contribution to this centenary 
of college Presidents. 

I do not object to incisive and constant criticism, 
and controversy is the very life and breath of intel- 
lectual advancement. A man in conspicuous and dis- 
tinguished position, to be worthy the devotion of his 
friends, must stir into perpetual activity the vigor and 
alertness of his foes. Up to the full measure of this 
standard has lived President Porter. But when the 
smoke of battle clears away, and we calmly sum up 
the achievements of his administration, we find it the 
most successful in the history of the college. The noble 
foundation of Sheffield, the splendid buildings erected 
by the wise munificence of Sloan, Peabody, Farnum, 
Durfee, Lawrence, Battell, Marquand, and others, are 
monuments more enduring than brass, while the num- 
ber of students in the various departments, bidding 
him a reverent farewell, in double the numbers which 
greeted his acceptance of the office, illustrates the con- 
fidence inspired by his teachings. May he live long in 
the enjoyment in health of the fruits of his labors, is 
the prayer to-day of every alumnus of Yale. 

The election of the grandson and namesake of one of 
Yale's greatest Presidents shows our faith in blood, and 
the improvement of the species. Tim Dwight the tu- 



336 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

tor, genial and learned, piloted our unruly class of '56 
safely through our course. One of our most prophetic 
members then predicted that the man who could so 
successfully accomplish a feat so difficult would one day 
rule the University. What '56 then saw, the whole Cor- 
poration now joyfully acknowledges, and our class, in 
common with all the rest, greets with enthusiasm the 
Reverend Timothy Dwight, D.D., President of Yale— 
always a boy, in full sympathy with the boys, filling 
the measure of a man who is a born leader of men. 
The only objections urged against him are that he is a 
Congregational minister and not eminent in athletics. 
We have got along very well with the first for two 
hundred years, and will be content if the next century 
shows equal development. We can safely leave our 
muscular reputation to the teams and the crews, even if 
their efficiency is sometimes threatened by the ineradi- 
cable prejudice of the College in favor of recitation. I 
predict for President Dwight a career of great glory and 
usefulness. I believe that in him will be fulfilled the 
poet's aspiration, as applied to the ancient Timothy and 

ours: 

From the sacred ashes of the feast 

Shall a new Rome in Phoenix grandeur burst. 

And now, gentlemen, conservatives and radicals, 
burying all differences in the supreme emotions of this 
hour, we pledge anew our allegiance, and one and all 
send heavenward a prayer for old Yale. 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEiV. 337 



S 



XXVI. 

PEECH AT THE DINNER AT DeLMONICO'S, GIVEN 

BY Yale Alumni to President Noah Porter, 
ON THE Occasion of his RetiremexNt, Janu- 
ary 2T^, 1886. 



Gentlemen : 

Our monthly meetings are held within ourselves, and 
our annual dinners without ourselves. We welcome 
on this occasion our President and faculty, non-resident 
alumni, and the representative of rival colleges. But 
this is our night. We have hired the hall and paid for 
the dinner, and it is our proud privilege to say what 
we please in praise of ourselves and criticism of our 
enemies. I have the poorest opinion of a man who 
cannot at least once a year, as a theologian or politi- 
cian, collegian or crank, shout himself hoarse for that 
which he believes or loves. Life is worth living only 
for those who can on occasion let their convictions 
loudly overcome their modesty. We have many 
speakers and but one sentiment. As the Saga to 
the Norseman, the Cross to the Crusader, that senti- 
ment warms our hearts and stirs our blood beyond all 
other rallying cries, and it is old Yale. It brings back 
the precious memories, the glorious times of our stu- 
dent days, the venerable age, the ever-vigorous youth, 
the noble fame of our Alma Mater. We are once more 



338 ORATIONS AMD SPEECHES OF 

at home with the elms, the fence, the campus, and 
the girls. 

Our relations with the foreign powers of Harvard, 
Princeton, and Columbia are somewhat less strained 
than they were a year ago. The humane resolutions 
of their faculties, forbidding them to encounter the sav- 
age athletes of New Haven, did much to restore har- 
mony, but their repeal will cause hostilities to break out 
anew. At the Princeton dinners I have been deeply 
grieved when Princeton, claiming to be the home of 
all the piety which is left in American colleges, has 
charged that Harvard was the most godless of our in- 
situtions, and at Harvard banquets pained by the retort 
that she alone possessed true spirituality and grace, 
while Princeton possessed only the husks of creeds. 
I have always succeeded in restoring friendly relations 
between these rivals and inspiring their gratitude to 
ourselves, by impartially assuring them that each was 
right as to the other, but the sum of what both claimed 
for themselves could only be found at Yale. An an- 
cient city had upon three of its gates "Be Bold," and 
upon the fourth "Be not too Bold." So Yale clings to 
the lessons of experience, and accepts slowly and with 
caution the suggestions of the time. Her faith has not 
grown with years in the self-reliant judgment and con- 
duct of youth, but she believes in the fruits of the prac- 
tice and doctrine of obedience. That boy flowers best 
into noblest manhood and rules himself and others, 
who has been taught to serve, and from the page grows 
the Chevalier Bayard, the knight for whom is as large 
a sphere to-day as in the age of chivalry. 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. 339 

While at the Harvard annual dinners the bill-of-fare 
and the toasts are printed in Latin as a deHcate tribute 
to a departed fetish, while the compulsory study of 
Latin and Greek has been abandoned in many schools, 
yet the classics survive and flourish in all the colleges, 
as the favorite elective in those Olympian games, the 
oar, the bat, the football, minstrelsy, and the stage 
which have become the primal elements of a liberal 
education. Yale firmly holds that Greek and Latin are 
and always will be essential to a liberal education. She 
admits that with age, experience, and opportunity, the 
time comes when the youth can be trusted to elect for 
himself the studies he will pursue, but that time is not 
■the beginning of freshman year. If you or I have any 
ability to do easily the hard and disagreeable duties of 
our profession or business, it is because we got at old 
Yale that mental discipline which comes alone from 
being compelled to study and to master the most diffi- 
cult and, as we then thought, detestable problems. 
Beyond all other sentiments, we cherish and revere 
through all the changes of life the men who crowded 
us at college toward their ideals. No matter how 
much we level up, genius and individuality in every 
department of thought or action will always lead. 

Yale owes her supreme position, without great wealth 
of endowment, to the self-sacrificing men who have 
given to her their lives, and to the four great Presidents 
who have governed her for a century. We have been 
busy for a hundred and fifty years in developing the 
country and founding colleges, and it is only recently 
that we felt it necessary to reform the Government of 



340 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

the Republic. First we furnished a Chief Justice to 
the Supreme Court of the United States; then we 
brought New York back to its old traditions of emi- 
nent representation in the Senate by giving her Evarts; 
then, when the American navy was sunk by a coal 
scow, and the new President felt that its restoration 
was essential to the success of his Administration, he 
chose for his secretary an experienced mariner from the 
navy of Yale ; and lastly, when a Harvard professor, by 
the splendor of his attainments and the brilliancy of his 
wit, had held captive the British nation for four years, 
Mr. Cleveland knew that he could only maintain friendly 
relations with England and advance the representation 
of his country at the Court of St. James, by drawing 
upon the faculty of Yale. 

Yale is the most cosmopolitan of colleges, and to 
meet in rivalry and friendship during the College's 
course the men from every State and Territory and from 
beyond the seas, is in itself a liberal education. When 
some great capitalist has given her several millions of 
dollars, he will have immortalized himself and solved 
the problem of the ideal American university. The 
Boston man doubts the security of his grave or of his 
hereafter unless he remembers Harvard in his will ; the 
Presbyterian of wealth feels that he will profit both his 
state hereafter and his estate here, by endowing Prince- 
ton ; but Yale has so broadly developed her sons, that 
she has reserved no class from which to conjure, and 
can only rely on the exceptional intelligence of the 
land. 

In our American republic of letters the colleges are 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEIV. 341 

the sovereign states. Their differences are in degrees 
of power and influence, but each has its merits and its 
characteristics, and they are all combined in a grand 
confederacy of liberal learning. Our old University is 
just now subject to sharp criticism and assault both 
from within and without. It is the highest proof of her 
vigor and activity. They say that she is apathetic; 
that she resists the new learning; while the revolution 
and liberty at Harvard, and the new departure there 
from discipline and compulsory lessons and creeds and 
prayers, creates discussion and is a potent advertise- 
ment ; that it arouses enthusiasm in the preparatory 
schools and draws the crowd to Cambridge. But even 
the disciples of the new learning admit, upon exam- 
ination, that the faculty of Yale are abreast of the 
times, and their work in every department equal to the 
best to be found anywhere, with many elements which 
are found nowhere else. She needs to copy from 
aggressive institutions in the West the genius of the 
patent medicine vendor and emblazon the natural scen- 
ery of the country with her merits, and to borrow from 
Harvard the art of painting the town red. Between 
the eleven Congregational clergymen in the Corpora- 
tion on the one side, and the eleven athletes of the 
ball-field on the other, old Yale in her teachers and cur- 
riculum is still the most generous home and strongest 
bulwark in this country of learning and religion. 

It would be a misfortune to Yale College and its 
growth to claim perfection and defy criticism. Posses- 
ing in a larger measure than any other seat of learning 
the schools of science, theology, law, medicine, and 



342 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

academic instruction, under-graduate and post-gradu- 
ate, which constitute a National University, her devel- 
opment has outgrown the college limits and requires 
such harmony of government that the strength of every 
department shall be the common property of all. Let 
the alumni be brought in closer communion and more 
intimate knowledge of her work. Let the faculty and 
the Corporation keep them advised, in confidence and 
in public, of her needs and of the way in which she 
marches abreast of, or leads, the learning of the times: 
then we shall "find that the fictions about her spring 
mainly from mystery and misinformation, and that her 
faculty and her alumni are her facts. 

During one hundred and eighty-seven years Yale has 
had ten Presidents. The four who have governed her 
for the past century have won imperishable fame for 
their College and themselves. Their names are house- 
hold words in every home in the land where learn- 
ing and character are cherished. They are Timothy 
Dwight, Jeremiah Day, Theodore D. Woolsey, and 
Noah Porter. The last, after a life devoted to the edu- 
cation of young men and the administration of a great 
trust, retires that he may enjoy a well-won rest. Dur- 
ing the fifteen years of his administration the average 
attendance has increased twenty-six per cent., and the 
number of instructors from seventy-one to one hundred 
and fourteen. The funds of the College have grown 
from one million, two hundred and twenty-seven thou- 
sand, three hundred and five dollars to two million, one 
hundred and fifty-five thousand, seven hundred and 
five dollars, and the usefulness of the University has 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEVV. 343 

been enlarged and its campus adorned with eight great 
buildings furnished and equipped for their work, each 
larger and better than any that existed at the time of 
his installation. 

That he may pass in vigor and health through long 
years of a serene and happy old age, is the prayer of 
Yale's Alumni all over the world ; it is the sentiment 
with which we of New York pledge him to-night. 



344 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 



s 



XXVII. 

PEECH AT THE SEMI-CENTENNIAL ANNIVERSARY 

OF THE St. Nicholas Society of the City of 
New York, February 28, 1885. 



I TRUST we will not have many recurrences of semi- 
centennials, because they seem to lead to a plenitude 
of weathercocks, and the staid and consistent charac- 
teristics of our society do not encourage too many em- 
blems of that nature. 

I do not stand here to-night, as did my friend Dr. 
Vermilye, to recall from personal recollections the first 
landing of the first Dutchman in New York ; nor am I 
one of the several gentlemen on this platform who, in 
middle life, inaugurated this society fifty years ago, and 
are still in a state of good preservation. The commit- 
tee have arranged with commendable discretion, and 
with that sense of propriety which characterizes the 
work of all our committees, a memorial which recalls 
and distinguishes in a peculiar way the thoughts and 
aspirations of the members present at the first meeting 
of this society. The day after that first and memor- 
able gathering, the gentlemen present on that night 
gave an order to the proprietors of the Gobelin tapes- 
tries to have woven in wonderful and enduring pictures 
the portraits of those sons who were expected to sue- 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. 345 

ceed the fathers who founded this organization ; and in 
the rosy cherubs playing amidst the tropical foliage of 
the tapestries which adorn the galleries, and which 
we borrowed from Sypher, you will find correct repre- 
sentations of the Beekmans, the Fishes, the de Pey- 
sters, the Livingstons, the Millses, and the rest of them, 
as they appeared at that early day. The artist, being 
a Frenchman, supposed that perpetual summer reigned 
in these latitudes. But, gentlemen, we meet here to- 
night not to be facetious, and there falls upon me the 
duty of delivering the historical address, which in its 
character is necessarily serious. We all of us, for fifty 
years, have been having a good time — that is, all those 
who are fifty years old ; I am not — and the object of 
our gathering on all festive occasions has been to 
have a good time. A Scotchman cannot thoroughly 
enjoy himself, for he is continually plunged in dejec- 
tion and gloom in the effort to grasp the jokes which 
he don't understand ; and the English and the French 
recall with sorrow the land from which they fled. But 
these, our festive occasions, are free from griefs, and 
are marked by no jealousies or strifes. We meet as 
becomes those who have life to enjoy, and know how 
to enjoy it, and we do it on these and all other occa- 
sions where our circumstances will permit. Our fund 
of thirty thousand dollars has accumulated from the 
fact that the committee appointed by the Society to 
seek out the objects who should be the recipients of its 
assistance, have never been able to discover one worthy 
of its charity within the limits of their view. He was 
always just beyond. But, for once in fifty years, you 
will pardon me if I am serious. Gentlemen who are 



346 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

present representing other nationalities and societies 
will forgive us, if once in half a century we lay aside 
our characteristic modesty, and emulate their frequent 
examples by speaking of ourselves. It is emphatically 
our night and our hall. We are met to recall the pur- 
poses and history of the Saint Nicholas Society, to 
commemorate the object for which it was organized, 
and the excellence, the nobleness, and the virtue of the 
ancestry from whom we sprang. 

In the ordinary life of a nation or a municipality, 
fifty years have been but a day. The original condi- 
tions of our American existence have destroyed the 
value of time as an element of progress and develop- 
ment. Cities whose founders are still living rival in 
population and prosperity the oldest and most success- 
ful capitals. This Society was organized to "collect 
and preserve information respecting the history, settle- 
ment, and manners of New York, and to promote so- 
cial intercourse among its native citizens." Its first 
half-century, though devoid of incident to itself, covers 
a period of municipal growth unparalleled in history. 
For more than a hundred years in different forms the 
descendants of the early inhabitants have sought to 
preserve the traditions of the fathers. Rivington s 
Gazetteer reports a celebration of the Sons of Saint 
Nicholas at Waldron's Tavern, a road-house on the 
Brooklyn side, in 1763; and again in 1784 that old 
chronicle records that the anniversary of Saint Nicho- 
las was celebrated "by the descendants of the ancient 
Dutch families." Doubtless each recurring birthday 
of our patron saint has for over two hundred years 
received appropriate recognition in festival and speech. 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEtV. 347 

But it was not until fifty years ago to-night that, 
with constitution and definite purposes, a Society was 
formed to perpetuate the memories of old New York 
and the virtues of its founders. Washington Irving 
walked into the assembly carrying the gilded rooster 
which had served as a weathervane upon the old Stadt 
Huys, or City Hall, from the first settlement of the city 
until the needs of a larger population required a new 
structure. He was so overcome with fright that he 
forgot the little speech he had prepared, and broke 
down during the first sentence. But this ancient bird, 
built in Holland after an old model, looking down for 
a century upon the city's daily life, its steady growth, 
the gathering of patriots, the conventions and con- 
gresses which preceeded and formulated the Republic, 
and now the silent Mentor at our meetings, speaks 
more eloquently than any records or musty documents 
of the sources of our strength. It saw the land from 
which we sprang. It marked the storm signals for the 
early mariner sailing in and out of our harbor, and under 
its weather^eye political clouds burst, first in protest and 
then in arms, to be followed by the pure atmosphere 
and clear sunlight of liberty. 

Our Society may properly trace its origin to 1609, 
when our Dutch ancestors first established their col- 
ony on Manhattan Island. The Puritan proves his 
claim to have originated and inspired all that makes 
our country free, intelligent, and great, by the repeti- 
tion of the history, principles, and characteristics of his 
forefathers. It is often better for fame to have emi- 
nent historians than to have enacted history. The 
judgment of mankind upon nations and peoples of the 



348 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

past is never formed from original sources, but made 
up from the accepted picture of the most popular artist. 
While the Pilgrim fully merits most of the praise which 
has crystallized into settled opinion, it has been his 
wonderful fortune to have the highest genius, elo- 
quence, thought, and philosophical acumen devoted 
to throwing about himself, his mission, his words and 
creations, now as they assert in course of partial reali- 
zation in our institutions and progress, a meaning, a 
self-denial, and prophetic construction for humanity, of 
which Brewster and Carver and Captain John Smith 
never dreamed. 

The Dutch settlers, on the other hand, by the magic 
pen of the father of American literature, became the 
victims of a caricature which captivated the fancy of 
the world and made the most potent factors in the 
founding and development of the freedom and pros- 
perity of our country the accepted subjects of good- 
natured ridicule and merriment. Two generations have 
been laughing at a marionette, whose antics have con- 
cealed the most important figure in the preservation of 
civil and religious liberty. 

Pliny says of this indomitable people, that, though 
dwelling in marshes and subsisting on fish, they reso- 
lutely refused to become absorbed into and enjoy the 
benefits of the great Roman Empire. Their conquests 
were beneficent victories over nature, and not bloody 
confiscations of subject peoples. They won their coun- 
try from the ocean, and by their dykes set bounds to 
the waters. They have pumped out the Harlem Sea 
and the Zuyder Zee, and transformed their depths into 
fruitful soil. They alone for a thousand years have en- 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. 349 

forced upon Neptune, "Thus far shalt thou come and 
no farther, and here shall thy proud waves be stayed." 
Though their country is only one-fourth the area of 
the State of New York, they fought for sixty-eight 
years to secure their independence against the power 
of Spain, then the strongest nation in Europe. And 
they won, because with them was liberty of conscience 
and of the individual, and universal education ; while 
the Spanish despotism crushed into dungeons, and pun- 
ished with torture and the stake, enlightenment, reli''-- 
ious liberty, and opinion. When the rest of Europe 
was in intellectual' darkness, Holland had her univer- 
sities, and a system of general education upon which 
our common schools are founded. While learning- Ian- 
guished elsewhere, Grotius promulgated a system of 
international law, Erasmus taught Greek to Oxford, 
Zacharias Janssens invented the telescope and the 
microscope whose revelations created modern science, 
and Lawrence Koster discovered the art of printing. 
When Koster made a Bible for five crowns, which be- 
fore him had cost the ransom of a prince, the Ameri- 
can Republic first became possible. For a time free 
thought was impossible in England, or upon the Conti- 
nent, and Holland became the bulwark, the refuge, and 
salvation of humanity. The spirit of her sons was 
illustrated at the siege of Leyden. There was but little 
food, and that the vilest offal ; starvation and pestilence 
afflicted the inhabitants; but when the Spaniard pro- 
posed surrender and generous terms, with submission 
to king and creed, "No," they replied, "we will eat our 
left arms and fight with our right, and set fire to our 
houses, and die in the flames, before we will be slaves." 



3SO ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

When, for their heroic defense, they were asked what 
should be their indemnity and reward, they answered : 
"Give us a national university." They gave to Eng- 
land that Bill of Rights which is the basis of Puritan 
liberty, and to us our form of government. In 1579 
the seven provinces of the Netherlands formed a repub- 
lic at Utrecht, and adopted for their motto, "Unity 
makes Might"; and in 1581 they promulgated their 
declaration of independence in these memorable words: 
"The people are not made for the prince, but the prince 
for the people, who always have the right to depose 
him if he should oppress them." This grand formula 
of liberty the Dutch asserted and maintained with their 
swords a hundred years before the English Declaration 
of Rights, and two hundred years before the American 
Declaration of Independence, and at a time when the 
belief was universal that kings were gods anointed, and 
could do no wrong. Here was the inspiration of Crom- 
well, Milton, and of Hampden, of Washington, Hamil- 
ton, Jefferson, and Adams. 

This was the people who in 1609 settled upon Man- 
hattan Island, and founded our city and State. They 
bought twenty-two thousand acres from the Indians for 
sixty guilders, and upon an honest title founded their 
city. They had circled the globe with their colonies ; 
with their three thousand ships and a hundred thous- 
and sailors they were the chief of maritime powers, and 
controlled the commerce of the world ; but they had 
no country save that submerged land, where Puri- 
tan and Huguenot, Catholic, Protestant, and Jew, have 
found hospitable and tolerant asylum. Their coming 
was attended by no loud professions of their virtue or 



CHAUNCEY Af. DEPEIV. 35 1 

their mission, but their object was to extend the trade 
of Holland, and by increasing the wealth and oppor- 
tunities of her people to add to their happiness; but 
the things above all others which they guarded and 
maintained were the common school and religious liber- 
ty. The first Dutch Governor brought with him a do- 
mine and a schoolmaster, each the first of his class on 
this continent, and Everardus Bogardus, the preacher, 
and Adam Roolandson, the teacher, were the pioneers 
of our American civilization. In this free and tolerant 
atmosphere the witchcraft superstition never found 
lodgment. The unfortunate victims fleeing to New 
York from New England for their lives, were warmly 
welcomed, and only by threat of war did Governor 
Stuyvesant rescue his sister-in-law, Judith Varlet, from 
the clutches of the fierce sectaries at Hartford, who 
had determined to burn her as a witch, because the 
Connecticut swains had lost hearts and heads for the 
Dutch beauty, who safely returned, married a Dutch- 
man, and became the ancestress of some of the noblest 
people in our State. While the Puritan colonies were 
in their wild terror imprisoning and executing the sus- 
pected, and every family was at the mercy of the ac- 
cuser, the Dutch and Huguenot ministers of New Am- 
sterdam unanimously resolved that "the apparition of a 
person afflicting another is very insufficient proof of a 
witch, and that a good name obtained by a good life 
should not be lost by mere spiritual accusation." Bap- 
tists, and the dissenters of every creed, fleeing from 
Masachusetts, were given homes and lands, the deeds 
declaring that they should "enjoy in peace the free exer- 
cise of their religion." The only efl"ort to curb heresy 



352 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OE 

which was affecting the prosperity of the Dutch church 
was made by Peter Stuyvesant. But the sturdy old 
Governor received from the home government so sharp 
a reprimand, that neither by him nor any man has the 
right of freedom of worship and opinion ever been ques- 
tioned in New York. In words which should be put 
upon our public buildings in letters of gold, they wrote : 
"The consciences of men ought to be free and un- 
shackled. Such have been the maxims of prudence 
and toleration by which the magistrates of this city, 
Amsterdam, have been governed ; and the consequen- 
ces have been that the oppressed and persecuted from 
every country have found among us asylum from dis- 
tress. Follow in the same footsteps and you will be 
blessed." 

When the English conquered New York in 1664, the 
city had about a thousand inhabitants, and three hun- 
dred houses; but there were three public, one Latin, 
and twenty private schools. The accession of William 
of Orange to the English throne brought here about 
five thousand more Dutch, and with the increase of the 
means of education the society of New York was the 
most learned and cultured in the country. Both men 
and women were familiar with the classics and the 
modern languages. The English paid little attention 
to education, and it continued under Dutch auspices 
until ten years after the Revolutionary War. The for- 
mation of the Free School Society in 1810 was a re- 
markable example of the Dutch faith in universal edu- 
cation. For fifty years, almost unaided, it furnished the 
means for popular learning, and only surrendered its 
great and magnificently administered trust when the 



CIIAUNCEY M. DEPEW. 353 

State was prepared to undertake this its most impor- 
tant duty. 

Upon this broad basis of civil and religious liberty, 
of toleration and education, was formed the metropo- 
lis of the New World. Here, nearly a hundred years 
before the Boston Tea Party, Jacob Leisler began the 
battle of colonial rights. Here, forty years before the 
Declaration of Independence, the trial of John Zenger 
established the freedom of the press upon principles 
which have since been incorporated in every State in 
the Union. Eleven years before the battle of Lexing- 
ton, the Assembly of New York protested against the 
Stamp Act and organized the colonies for resistance to 
British aggression, and the Stamp Act Congress, sitting 
in this city, first boldly proclaimed that taxation with- 
out representation is tyranny, and paved the way to 
American independence. When the last British soldier 
had embarked at the Batter>^ those two most promi- 
nent citizens of New York, Alexander Hamilton and 
John Jay, began the publication of The Federalist, 
which out of the chaos of confederation organized a 
constitutional republic. The Government of the United 
States which began life in this city with the inaugura- 
tion of Washington in Wall Street, reflected in every 
part the influence of Dutch examples. Its federal 
form, its toleration of creeds, its hospitable invitation 
to the oppressed of all lands, its liberal views on trade 
and commerce, its official terms and titles, came from 
the home of the f^rst settlers in New York. They pro- 
claimed no mission for themselves or mankind, but 
without boasting, with modesty, industry, and inflexi- 
ble principle, they so builded their part of our great 



354 ORA TIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

temple of liberty as to deserve the undying affection and 
reverence of their descendants, and the respect and 
gratitude of the world. This city and State, which 
they founded, and in which, in their spirit, the peoples 
of every nation and of every faith enjoy equal privi- 
leges and freedom with their sons, are their monu- 
ments. When William of Orange received the crown 
of England in the old hall of Westminster, and the 
charters of English liberty were read to him, with his 
hand on his sword he swore, "I will maintain." To- 
night we take up anew the glories, the traditions, and 
the lessons of old New York, with the solemn oath, 
"We will maintain." 



CHA UNCE Y M. DEPE W. 355 



S 



XXVIII. 

peech at the first annual dinner of the 
Holland Society of New York, at the Hotel 
Brunswick, January 8, 1886. 



GoOD-EVENING, Van.* [A roar of laughter drowned 
the reply, if any was made. Mr. Depew continued :] 
Don't all speak at once. I never knew a Van who 
wasn't always on hand when there was anything to eat 
and drink, but this collection beats any that I ever saw 
before. There is just one thing, by the way, which the 
Philharmonic Society will never regret ; and that is that 
the Dutch songs attempted here to-night are not the only 
musical gems of which our city can boast. Gentlemen, 
one of the most curious psychological conundrums that 
a man was ever called upon to solve is: Why did Judge 
Van Wyck, when he asked if we came here to get a 
full drink, look straight at me? What are we here for? 
it has been asked. We have the St. Nicholas Society, 
a most estimable organization, that for an annual 
tax of ten dollars gives you four stated banquets, and 
two dinners at half-price. It has a large and respect- 
able membership, which, in keeping with the thrifty 
precepts of our ancestors, regularly attends the four 
free banquets, and is unavoidably detained from being 
present at the two dinners a half-price. I am a lover of 

* The names of 150 of the 200 gentlemen present began with " Van." 



356 OKA TIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

old things — old wine, for instance, and old women. 
Gentlemen, what heart here has not thrilled this even- 
ing at that beautiful painting by Mr. Turner, the "Old 
Dutch Woman Reading her Bible !" How many a gray 
head, here, knelt years ago at such a knee ! The influ- 
ence of Dutch women such as that has molded the fate 
of religious liberty in this whole world. And, gentle- 
men, I respect the Saint Nicholas Society, for it is a 
venerable and an ancient one. Why, then, should we 
form another? I will tell you. It is because you and 
I have felt our blood on fire when we were present at 
those dinners, and have heard it said : "This is not a 
Dutch society. The pipes are Dutch ; the vienii is 
in alleged Dutch ; but this is merely a society of old 
New York, and includes men of all nationalities and of 
no nationality." 

That is why the Holland Society was founded. But 
still it is asked, what are we here for? We know what 
we're here for. We've got it. Those fellows over in 
Delmonico's to-night, at the Merchants' Dinner to Gov- 
ernor Hill, don't know what they are there for, and 
they never will know until the prizes and offices are 
distributed. Then they will realize, as many better 
men have realized before them, that on a January day 
of a certain temperature many are left, and but few are 
chosen. The famous question of the patriotic Mr. 
Flanigan of Texas, in the National Convention at Chi- 
cago, What are we here for if we don't get the offices? 
becomes reflectively both painful and significant when 
the gentlemen who are forgotten in the spoils remem- 
ber that they paid for the dinner. 

I went down to the reporters' table before the speech- 



CHA UNCE Y M. DEPE W. 357 

making commenced — there were twelve of them there 
at that time ; there isn't one left now — and I said to 
them: "Boys, I suppose you have come to hear Sena- 
tor Voorhees speak on the silver question, and Secre- 
tary Bayard discuss our diplomatic relations with Aus- 
tria. I am sorry that they didn't come ; but there will 
be at least one good speech to-night. You had bet- 
ter stay." But with one accord they answered and 
spake unto me, saying : "Chauncey, we've reported that 
speech seventeen times !" But to come back to the 
question, Why has not a distinctly Dutch society been 
formed before? Because in the Dutch character there 
are two principles : one, that it is wrong to do wrong, 
and everybody knows it ; the other, that it is so natural 
to do right that it is expected of every one, and there 
is no use making a fuss about it. 

I tell you, gentlemen, it is to Holland that this coun- 
try owes her common schools and her love of liberty ; 
to Holland, that heroic little State whose noble prince 
said, when offered the hand of King James's daughter, 
"I cannot sacrifice my honor and my country's honor 
for the sake of your alliance" ; to that heroic little State 
that stood alone and unsupported among her enemies 
and listened to the voice of her prince when he said : 
"Though our country disappear beneath the sea, if our 
independence be preserved, all is not lost." And, thank 
God, the sea did roll over her fields ! Her honor and her 
independence were preserved ; and her prince married 
the daughter of King James, without the exaction of 
an obligation from him out of keeping with truth and 

right. 

We hear much of the Puritan and of Plymouth Kock. 



358 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

The true Puritan was a bigot and a sectary ; fighting 
to preserve his own religious liberty and to destroy 
that of every one else ; believing conscientiously in the 
political freedom of himself, and the political suppres- 
sion of everybody else. The Puritans left England and 
went to Holland. There were four hundred of them, 
divided into three hundred sects. They went up to 
the Hague, and there in the Great Congregation they 
learned that one man's religion was as good as an- 
other's. And God in His mercy kept them eleven 
years in a state of probation in Holland before he let 
them land on Plymouth Rock. And in their after-lives 
they did credit to their preceptors, and to the lessons 
they had learned while in that state of probation. It 
was the teachings of Holland that rendered the Revo- 
lution and the Constitution possible. Those Pilgrim 
Fathers that journeyed to New England by way of Hol- 
land never burned witches or whipped Quakers or dis- 
graced themselves and their religion by other exhibi- 
tions of narrow intolerance. It was the Puritans who 
came after them, straight from England, without the 
softening influence of Holland, who smirched the pages 
of New England's history. 

This, gentlemen, was the country too modest to write 
her own history ; the country that had to wait the com- 
ing of a Motley before her story could be fitly told. 
Her children, the Dutch settlers of America and their 
descendants, have too long emulated the modesty of 
the mother-country. We have quietly occupied the 
back pews, while the Yankees and Scotchmen and Irish- 
men at their annual dinners have claimed everything 
that is worth claiming in our city and country. Why, 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. 359 

gentlemen, there are people who actually believe that 
there was no demand ever made for civil and religious 
liberty until the Declaration of Independence; people 
who are ignorant of the fact that, two centuries before 
that document was signed, Holland had poured out her 
blood and treasure for those very principles : thundered 
them in the face of Europe from the cannon's mouth ; 
flaunted them o'er sea and land upon the Beggars' Sack, 
and formally enunciated them in words which Jefferson 
only quoted. Many fondly believe that in America 
was first founded a Republic of Sovereign States; but 
the plan in its letter and spirit was copied from the 
Dutch. By the compact of Utrecht, the seven prov- 
inces of the Netherlands formed a free government in 
1579, with the sentiment "Unity makes Might"; and 
in 1787 the United States of America were builded 
upon the same model, and adopted for their motto 
"E Pluribus Unum." The principles of Dutch liberty 
were education and toleration. The Puritans found in 
Holland a school system supported by the State, and 
the doors of her universities open to students of all 
creeds and nationalities, at a time when all other seats 
of learning were closed to those who denied their dog- 
mas in religion or did not commune with their church. 
Free thought, free speech, inquiry, discussion, and the 
open Bible were unknown except in this little corner of 
Europe, which its indomitable people had rescued from 
the sea, and waged perpetual battle with the ocean to 
keep. The Pilgrims brought the common school from 
Holland and planted it on Plymouth Rock, and it has 
been for two hundred years the inspiration of Yankee 
growth, power, and conquest, and the corner-stone of 



360 OR A TIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

New England's eloquence, and the source of her boast 
that she alone has furnished the brains for American 
liberty and expansion. But the Knickerbockers' school- 
master and domine were already established institu- 
tions on Manhattan Island, and their beneficent, civiliz- 
ing, and humanitarian influences following the Indian 
trails, the highways of commerce, the Dutchman's own 
Erie Canal, and the Great Lakes, carried the elements 
and fructifying forces of freedom into new Territories 
and laid the foundations of sovereign States. 

The Jew, the Huguenot, the Puritan, even the perse- 
cuted Catholic, was welcomed in Holland with hos- 
pitality and employment, and, unharmed and unmo- 
lested, could there worship God in his own way, and 
was only restrained from interfering with his neigh- 
bor's worshiping God in his way. But in that critical 
period in the history of the race, when every hope of 
humanity was lost everywhere in the world, except 
Holland ; when she alone, relying in steadfast faith 
upon the God above and the waves about her, was 
sheltering the rights of man against the combined forces 
of despotism and bigotry, she was not content to sim- 
ply save liberty; but by the invention of types and the 
creation of a printing-press, she organized the new cru- 
sade against darkness and superstition in Church and 
State, which has ever since been triumphantly march- 
ing down the ages, emancipating the mind from the 
thraldom of ignorance and bigotry, and transferring 
power from the throne to the people. 



CffA UNCE V M. DEPE IV. 36 1 



A 



XXIX. 

DDRESS AT THE DEDICATION OF THE MONUMENT 

OF THE New York Press Club, at Cypress 
Hills Cemetery, June 12, 1887. 



Mr. President and Gentlemen of the Press 
Club: 
The occasion which calls us together is both sad and 
comforting. It reminds us of the horrors of a lonely 
death and suggests some of its alleviations. It is emi- 
nently fit and appropriate that our ceremonies are upon 
the Sabbath day, when our thoughts and feelings are 
inspired and moved by the victory over the grave in 
the assuring promises of a glorious resurrection. In 
this month of June, with its balmy air, its wealth of leaf 
and flower and fruit, we forget the destruction and de- 
cay of winter and learn from Nature that ever recurr- 
ing and beautiful lesson which takes from the cemetery 
its terrors. The memorial monuments of a people 
mark their civilization and humanity, and the care they 
give to that spot which the Germans so tenderly desig- 
nate as God's Acre tells of the power and development 
of home and family and friendship. From primitive man 
to the height of Greek intellectuality, and then down 
through Roman barbarism and the night of the dark 
ages until we rise again to \he splendid evolution of mind 



362 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

and heart and soul in our era, we review all the miser- 
ies, the misfortunes, and the gains of our race. One 
of the sure evidences of progress or decay in humaniz- 
ing influences is the treatment of the unknown and the 
friendless living or dead. The hundred years of our 
existence as a nation exhibit in connection with our 
marvelous growth and development in commerce, manu- 
factures, invention, and population, the relation of in- 
dividuals to each other and the community which 
preceding ages have not shown. In the mighty move- 
ment of the tremendous forces which control our indus- 
trial life, the individual, upon whom our fathers built 
their government, has been lost. He has become an 
atom in a vast system of organized machinery. The old 
days of universal acquaintance and interest, when the 
cords of sympathy connected all the members of the 
community, and the friendless and suffering felt at 
once a neighbor's helpful hand, are gone. The surging 
crowd rushes by the helpless stranger, too careless to 
stop, or too fearful of fraud or contamination to listen. 
Poor, alone, and sick in a great modern city crushes 
out hope, and despair gives way to death. A man dies 
calmly and courageously when he knows that he will 
be buried among his kindred, or that loving hands will 
care for his remains. Every body of workers should 
have a lot for their homeless dead. Around the open 
grave they would be so reminded of their duties to their 
brethren, that the old loving and helpful spirit would 
return, recruiting the broken ties of primitive neighbor- 
hoods, restoring the sick and hopeless to health and 
usefulness, or smoothing his pathway through the dark 
valley. 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEIV. 363 

It will remain as one of the best deeds of the Press 
Club that it has purchased this resting-place and erected 
upon it this monument. It redounds to the honor of 
journalism that the fund largely came from the efforts 
of one of its working members whose talents and versa- 
tility are so widely appreciated. This cemetery is full 
of memorials to the departed, telling their varied stories 
of family bereavements ; but none of them will have so 
wide and deep significance as this shaft. From each 
mournful visit, as the survivors leave, they will bear 
with them a broader charity for, and a healthier kin- 
ship to, each other. It is the mission of the Club to 
overcome the necessary resentments which arise from 
the controversies and antagonisms of the profession, 
and to promote harmony and good feeling among its 
members. 

The reporterial corps has furnished the most power- 
ful influence of modern thought. From it have come 
not only the editors, but the contributors to our litera- 
ture whose names are immortal. In glorious battles 
for the liberty of the press, it has promoted the free- 
dom of mankind. But in no work does the strueelintr 
beginner or the aged veteran stand more in need of the 
sympathy and strength of a club or society organized 
and equipped for mutual good. The soldier is inspired 
with the hope of promotion, the dream of glory, and 
he becomes a hero in the maddening passions of the 
battle. But the reporter, with no incentive but duty, 
shares the warrior's dangers and exposures, notes in the 
thickest of the fray the fortunes of the fight, and while 
the camp is asleep rides many miles through a hostile 
country to send to his paper the first account of the 



364 ok A TiONS AND SPEECHES OF 

carnage and the victory, in a message which electrifies 
the nation and bears no signature. I wished at one 
time to find the author of a report in one of our dailies. 
I discovered that he had been a gallant officer in the 
Civil War, and was mustered out at its close covered 
with honorable scars, and bearing with him a noble rec- 
ord. He took up once more the occupation of his early 
manhood, and his graphic pen made picturesque the 
columns of his paper. A few nights before my inquiry 
he was reporting a great fire ; many lives were in dan- 
ger; where none others dared go, he fearlessly vent- 
ured, and fell a sacrifice to his courage and humanity. 
Three lines of cold narration was the sum of his earthly 
fame. But if then he could have had before him ten- 
der care and burial at the hands of his brethren, that 
gallant soul would have been spared its bitterest pang, 
and in his memorial services the world would have 
learned what it had lost and sacredly treasured his 
story. The great liners plow the seas, their depar- 
ture and arrival, their speed, their passengers, heralded 
around the world and enlisting the eager interest of 
two hemispheres. An accident to one of them is a 
calamity which stirs millions of people in many coun- 
tries. An ocean-tramp steamer, freighted with lives as 
precious, goes to the bottom, and the memory of her 
is lost as quickly as the waters reunite over the spot 
where she sank. The men of brilliant success among 
the brain-workers are the darlings of fortune and the 
idols of the hour, but the great mass of those whose 
minds are their only capital, workshop, and tools, strug- 
gle against every element of discouragement. In peace- 
ful valleys among the New England hills or on the West- 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEVV. 3^5 

ern plains are the homes in which they were reared and 
educated, but to which they have bid good-by forever; 
and, alone in the great city, the ambition for fame and 
wealth is satisfied by ceaseless effort to win a comfort- 
able living. Every consideration of happiness, security, 
and safety should bind such men together, so that each 
might feel the vigor and strength of a great, prosper- 
ous, and aggressive organization. Two of the most 
famous journalists of their time were Greeley and Ray- 
mond. Presidents, Cabinets, and Congressmen were 
their creation and subject to their control. The land 
was filled with their controversies and their fame. And 
yet death came to each of them in its most terrible and 
tragic form. Loving friends and millions of mourning 
and sympathetic admirers gave them tender ceremonial 
and sepulture, but there was a period in both of their 
lives when a Press Club, and a plot and monument such 
as we here dedicate, could alone have rescued them 
from nameless graves. To some of you will come the 
opportunity to fill the measure of their commanding 
influence and power. To all of you is assigned a por- 
tion of their work and its results. 

The newspaper is the most important factor in our 
social and public life. Through it all nations and races 
by their deeds and opinions daily act and react upon 
each other in the approach to substantial unity in the 
aims and liberties of all the people of the globe. The 
reader has no thought for or interest in the great army 
which makes up this library of information, discussion, 
and imperious direction as to the character and official 
acts of public officers and the duties of private citizens. 
The journal is to him an impersonal expression of popu- 



366 ORA TIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

lar feeling which sways his judgment, but he rarely 
recognizes the man behind it. But here all strifes are for- 
gotten, and all enmities healed. Whether critics or criti- 
cised, governors or governed, employers or employees, 
we are in the presence of death, of one family and kin- 
dred, with equal aims and a common end. From this 
spot will flow those tender and beneficent influences by 
which the voices of those who have gone before come 
to us from the spirit land with their messages of hope 
and rest, of charity, loyalty, and good-fellowship. On 
each recurring anniversary of that social day when their 
children and their comrades decorate the soldiers' graves 
with flowers, you will hang garlands upon this shaft and 
strew wreaths upon the soil which covers these humble 
heroes who also died at the post of duty, and the world 
Avill be happier, brighter, and better for this closer com- 
munion of the strong and the weak, the successful and 
the unfortunate, the prosperous and the poor. 



CHA UNCE Y M. DEPE W. 3^7 



T 



XXX. 

HE Liberty of the Press.— Address before 
THE New York State Press Association, at 
the Madison Square Theater, New York, 
June 19, 1883. 



Gentlemen: 

It is difificult for one more than ordinarily engrossed 
in business cares to secure the time to fairly treat a 
subject so important as the Liberty of the Press. It 
would be presumptuous in a layman to address profes- 
sionals upon this theme, if its inviolability and invul- 
nerability within proper limits were not more important 
to the rest of the State than to the editors themselves. 
Libraries have been filled with the literature of civil 
and religious liberty, but the record of this essential 
element in the triumph and maintenance of either is 
comparatively meager. The block, the scaffold, and 
the stake have been illuminated and adorned by illus- 
trious victims, martyrs to free thought and human 
right, but they have been leaders in revolutions for re- 
form.s in the State and purification in the Church. The 
heroes in the battle for the liberty of the Press have 
not shed their blood, but in the two hundred years 
since the founding of the newspaper they have been 
always braving and suffering incarceration and confisca- 
tion. The Press had no part in the struggles for their 



368 ORA TIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

rights among the peoples of antiquity or medieval times, 
but in the mighty movements of the present and pre- 
ceding century, it has broken the ground and prepared 
the way for the soldier and the statesman. 

To prove this, we need not refer to the past, but to 
day can find abundant illustrations. In autocratic Rus- 
sia, the Nihilist plots in the dark ; the terrorist furtive- 
ly hurls his dynamite bomb, careless and reckless of 
the hundreds of innocent people killed and maimed, if 
he can reach the Czar and secure safety for himself ; 
the revolutionists meet in secret in cellars and garrets, 
but the editor alone daily runs the risk of ruin and 
Siberia. The police need not search for him, he is to be 
found at his desk; he knows that the suspension of his 
paper means the sudden loss of income; its suppres- 
sion, hopeless poverty; and gradually feeling his way, 
educating the people, and undermining the throne, he 
disregards the warning and defies the censor, resumes 
his work when the limit of suspension has expired to take 
bolder and higher ground — for to such men there is no 
backward step, — and when the inevitable hand of arbi- 
trary power falls and crushes him and his, the grave of 
his hopes is another mile-stone marking the progress in 
the construction of the road to liberty. 

It is a natural process in the development of the 
mind, that the constant discussion of daily events at 
home and abroad, with their relations to the foreign 
policy of the country, and to every function of govern- 
ment, not only enlarges and broadens the grasp of liv- 
ing questions, but inspires in the most timid of men an 
unusual independence of opinion and daring in its ex- 
pression. He cannot constantly record injustice and 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. 3^9 

wrong, without exposing the perpetrators, asking re- 
dress, or suggesting a remedy. And so under Bour- 
bons, and Napoleons, and the Stuarts and the Georges, 
the Press has openly led the fight for freedom, and 
shared in its triumphs. 

The one man to whom the Press is more indebted 
than all others is that marvelous genius, who, with 
rarest indifference to personal fame, buried his personal- 
ity in devotion to his principles, and wrote under the 
name of Junius. In an age remarkable for its venality 
and servility in Parliament, in politics, and the Press, 
when it took little more than the whim of a minister to 
suppress a newspaper or imprison an editor, Junius sud- 
denly appeared as an inspired evangel of destruction 
and reparation, of purification and enlightenment. He 
revolutionized the relations of the Press to the Govern- 
ment and the people. Master of every weapon of con- 
troversy, and with unequaled power in the use of the 
English language, he discussed men and affairs with the 
information of a cabinet minister and the best states- 
manship of his time. He broke over the barriers which 
hedge the king and the privileges which Parliament had 
thrown about itself, and gave enormous impetus to the 
growing idea of the responsibility of the representative 
to his constituency. The paper through which he spoke 
remained unmolested because King and peer and com- 
moner knew that he had concentrated and voiced pub- 
lic opinion. While not directly bearing upon that ques- 
tion yet the light he shed upon the measures and mo- 
tives of public men so seconded the efforts of the press 
to publish the proceedings of Parliament, that after a few 
fitful efforts to resist the right, in which Richard Brins- 



37° ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

\&y Sheridan did glorious work, that most important 
safeguard of Hberty was secured. In all countries which 
have representative government, the one thing which 
checks corruption and promotes patriotism, which passes 
good measures and defeats bad ones, which destroys 
little men and gives great men their opportunity, is that 
publicity of proceedings in which the newspaper pos- 
sesses and exercises its greatest power. 

But the Press still had impending over it a menace 
which impaired its independence and partially para- 
lyzed its usefulness, and that was the law of libel. 
Under the construction that the greater the truth the 
greater the libel, the early newspapers of Massachusetts 
were suppressed and their editors punished. Benjamin 
Franklin, then only sixteen years of age, but a writer of 
recognized force, received in the discipline administered 
to himself and his paper that first lesson as to the value 
of liberty which afterwards bore such abundant and 
glorious fruit. It was reserved, however, for New York 
to rescue the Press from this peril and secure for it its 
greatest privilege. 

While the Dutch, who settled New York, and were 
at this time the controlling element in its society, are 
not propagandists or crusaders, they surpass all races in 
stubborn resistance to oppression and obstinate defense 
of their rights. Though King James, when the Eng- 
lish conquered the colony, gave it no other charter than 
his royal will, and solemnly decreed that no newspaper 
should ever be published in the province, the Dutch- 
man printed his paper, and it became the leader of the 
Revolution and awakened the other colonies to the 
necessities of the strruggle. When Governor Cosby 



CHA UNCE Y M. DEPE W. 37' 



ordered the Mayor and Council to attend the burning of 
Peter Zenger's paper by the hangman, they refused to 
go ; when after nine months' imprisonment Zenger was 
brought to trial, and his counsel, the venerable Andrew 
Hamilton, then eighty years of age, demanded that the 
truth of the alleged libel should be given in evidence 
and taken by the jury in justification of the publication, 
a New York jury, against the direction of the judge, 
acquitted Zenger. The result was received with bon- 
fires and processions, with cannon-firing and general re- 
joicing. It forced the British Government to meet the 
growing disaffection in the colonies, not by suppress- 
ing the Press, but by subsidizing these newspapers to 
counteract it. Though the ablest lawyers, clergymen, 
college presidents and government officials entered the 
lists in these columns as champions of the royal author- 
ity, they were ignominiously routed and overthrown in 
newspaper combat, long before the questions were sub- 
mitted to the arbitration of arms, by the Adamses, War- 
ren and Otis in Massachusetts, Alexander Hamilton 
and John Jay in New York, Benjamin Franklin in Penn- 
sylvania, and Thomas Jefferson in Virginia. Limited 
in number and circulation, yet the colonial press ac- 
complished more than all other agencies in preparing 
the way for the Declaration of Independence, and in 
keeping the people during the long and exhausting 
Revolutionary War inspired with patriotism to continue 

and to conquer. 

But after the Revolution, in the fierce strife of par- 
tisanship, the Press was again confronted with its old 
enemy, the law of libel. To the rescue of the impris- 
oned editor, and to vindicate for all time the liberty of 



372 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

the Press, came that most extraordinary lawyer, states- 
man, and financier, Alexander Hamilton. In an ad- 
dress of wonderful power he carried the jury and the 
people, and in the very language of his brief the free- 
dom of the Press was incorporated in the constitution 
or the statutes of every State in the Union and the laws 
of England. 

The Press was now free from all danger of arbitrary 
interference by the Government or the courts, but it 
was not emancipated. All the newspapers of the young 
Republic became the personal organs of Jefferson, 
Madison, and Monroe, on the one side, and Hamilton, 
Adams, and Jay on the other. These statesmen either 
contributed or inspired their utterances. The editor 
was only an echo, his paper a shadow. The control of 
the Government was the prize for which these giants 
were contending, and interest and ambition gave intense 
viciousness and vindictiveness to the Press thus edited 
and controlled. Washington charged Jefferson in Cabi- 
net meeting with having written a bitter assault in a 
Philadelphia paper upon his administration and char- 
acter, and the hates and fears of the combatants were 
reflected in the unexampled animosity and absolute 
unfairness of all newspaper discussion and criticism. 

When leading politicians became too numerous and 
factions too many to longer continue the individual 
control of organs, the Press became the servile instru- 
ment of Party to secure patronage or retain it. For 
many years the rigid enforcement of the doctrine, "to 
the victors belong the spoils," was equally fatal to the 
political independence of the newspaper or the indi- 
vidual. At the command of General Jackson, the 



CHA UNCE Y A/. DEPE W. 373 

National hitelligencer is set aside, and the Telegraph 
and Duff Green come into favor; Green falls under 
suspicion, and by the same autocratic will the Tele- 
graph and Green are ruined by the withdrawal of the 
Government support, and the Globe and Francis P. 
Blair secure power and riches by its bestowal. The 
Council of Revision and Appointment, in our own 
State, by the same processes, held the Press of New 
York by the throat. In the South, Calhoun, Hayne, 
and McDufifie gave to the Press its opinions and argu- 
ments, and the bullet and the torch quieted protest and 
rebellion. 

A little more than a quarter of a century ago began 
the real liberty of the Press, and by the rapid processes 
of evolution which characterize all efforts towards free- 
dom, it has reached its present position of absolute 
irresponsibility to any power but itself. Congress and 
Legislatures regard it with awe and fear. Judges will 
no longer deliver hostile charges or juries convict; 
politicians have become its followers, and it dictates 
policies to parties. It is an educator in every branch 
of human thought and activity. It opens all the doors 
of the mind and enters for good or ill. It has unre- 
stricted admission to the house and unrivaled influence 
in the family. It exercises, and in a sense fills, the 
functions of preacher and teacher, of censor and critic, 
of thinking and voting for its readers. Napoleon said 
that four newspapers were more dangerous than a hun- 
dred thousand soldiers, and he thought his conquests 
unstable until he had subdued the Press of Europe and 
compelled it to take its opinions from the Moriiteiir, 
which he edited himself. Samuel Taylor Coleridge wag 



374 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

a writer on a London paper, at the insignificant salary 
of a guinea a week. And yet his editorials so disturbed 
the Emperor that Fox declared in the House of Com- 
mons that the Treaty of Amiens would be broken and 
the peace of Europe destroyed unless those articles 
were stopped. Afraid to touch the liberty of the Press, 
the British Cabinet, nevertheless, secretly informed 
Bonaparte of the vessel Coleridge was on, coming from 
Italy to England. In pursuit of this then obscure au- 
thor sailed French frigates and sloops of war, and the 
most magnificent tribute ever paid to the power of the 
Press was this union of treachery and force by the 
two greatest nations upon earth to silence a humble 
journalist. 

With the incalculabl}^ greater influence of the news- 
paper of to-day, what are the limitations it ought to set 
to its liberties? This is a question of profoundest mo- 
ment and anxiety to every self-respecting journalist. 
Party duties and responsibilities exercise a healthful 
restraint. Republics cannot be governed well except 
by party organizations, so evenly balanced and watch- 
ful that the errors of the one are the opportunity of the 
other. An alert, vigorous, and aggressive opposition 
is the surest method of securing faithful service and 
honest measures. I like a party paper, impregnably 
fixed in its principles, and which fights vigorously and 
hits hard; but it should have that measure of liberty 
which will make conventions of its party fear to submit 
to its criticisms unworthy nominations, and the legis- 
latures of its party afraid to promote bad measures. 
It is better for any organization to suffer defeat by in- 
dependent protest against manifest wrong than to be 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. 375 

perpetually upon the platform of explanation, or kneel- 
ing upon the stool of repentance. It seldom happens 
that the situation is as embarrassing as one where Hor- 
ace Greeley once said to me, in regard to a prominent 
nomination, "That man is an infernal rascal, and I in- 
tended to oppose him, but the Democrats have put 
up against him a man who is as big a rascal, and a d — d 
fool to boot. I prefer the one quality, pure and una- 
dulterated, and shall support the regular ticket." 

The Press is the mirror of the daily life of the world, 
but it performs the very highest duty in selecting what 
it shall reflect. The newspaper is read by the boy be- 
fore he begins the study of his morning's lesson, and it 
is his companion after he returns from school ; it is be- 
side our daughter in her boudoir and her bedroom ; it 
drops into those young lives facts, thoughts, and im- 
pressions which bear sweet or bitter fruit in after years. 
You and I have known the whole moral nature of youth 
soiled and spoiled by this unguarded and unguardable 
communion. There are cases of leprosy and small-pox, 
and a vast variety of unsightly and contagious diseases 
in the hospitals, but we do not take our families to see 
them. There are in the by-streets and alleys nightly 
scenes which furnish food for earnest reflection to the 
reformer and sociologist, but if we can help it our 
children never hear of them. We become the willing 
victims of the plumber to keep sewer gas out of our 
houses, and the newspaper under the guise of faithful 
reporting, with picturesque and attractive details, has 
not the liberty to bring all these things and worse mto 
our homes. It is often said that there is enormous 
profit in ministering to the depraved and debased clc- 



376 ORA TIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

ments in human nature, and that the papers which re- 
frain throw away fortunes. I do not believe it, if the 
paper has come to stay. The Sxuitches and Scorpions, 
and all their brood are notoriously short-lived and un- 
profitable. The family is the unit of society, and no 
matter what its head may be, he does not introduce or 
tolerate in that circle any element which he believes 
will destroy it. Without the family support no news- 
paper can survive, and that journal will have the long- 
est life, the largest profits, and the greatest influence 
which as far as possible admits to its columns only 
such matter as its editor would freely narrate at his 
own table. 

It is said that whenever two Russians are together 
one of them is a Government spy, and the opinions of 
every individual, no matter where uttered, are part of 
the records of the secret police. In our higher civiliza- 
tion and perfect freedom, the "Third Section" has no 
existence, but the Press performs its functions and 
shares its secrets with all the world. The reporter and 
the interview have destroyed the privacy of domicile 
and of thought. They walk -with the Czar to his coro- 
nation, and wring- from their keepers the mysteries of 
the Empress's wardrobe. They disclose the discus- 
sions of the Cabinet to the people, and to the parents 
the first details of an elopement. They print the next 
morning the most sacred proceedings of the Executive 
Session, and on the occasion of your daughter's wed- 
ding describe the dresses and the undergarments which 
constitute the bridal outfit, with their quality, style, 
and cost. They pump from a theologian seeking no- 
toriety the brave statement of his half-hearted heresy, 



CHA UNCE V M. DEPE W. 377 



and in the same column overwhelm him with the 
anathemas of his brethren to whom they have submitted 
it. They compel politicians to talk by threatening to 
report imputed opinions, and set prima-donnas by the 
ears by encouraging their jealousy and vanity. They 
divulge the points of great operators, and invade the 
homes of railroad magnates and publish their plans. 
Rebuffs are their invitation, assaults their opportunity; 
sometimes thrashed but never defeated, they mend their 
bones and increase their incomes by embalming their 
victims in a vivid description of the fight. Fifty years 
ago this exercise of the liberty of the Press would have 
led to breaches of the peace and to murder, but the 
community of to-day applauds and calls for more. A 
sense of security in absolute publicity is an underlying 
force in all free governments, and there is great good 
in our refinement of the principle which compels men, 
whose position is official or semi-public in relation to 
their fellows, to frequent accountability, but it at least 
admits of a doubt whether it should be carried so far 
as to take the place of the gossip or the detective. 

The error into which tbis feeling of irresponsibility 
sometimes leads the Press is that it controls and there- 
fore can defy the public. But while docile and tracta- 
ble, so as to be easily swayed or led within certain legiti- 
mate boundaries, yet public opinion is always the mas- 
ter. That newspaper is strongest which best reflects 
it. In molding and forming the views of the commu- 
nity as to men or measures, the newspaper wields a 
mighty influence; but the most powerful organ cannot 
run counter to the beliefs or moral sense of its con- 
stituency. The whole Press of the North could not 



37^ ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

have subdued the indignant outburst at the firing upon 
Sumter, or checked the grief at the death of Garfield. 
The Press interprets and enforces doctrines and faiths, 
but is confronted by a thousand forces if it attempts 
their overthrow. The traveler in the Western Reserve 
of Ohio asked a farmer about the times ; "Bad enough," 
said he, "my Democratic neighbor got his newspaper 
yesterday and floored me completely this morning, but 
when the Weekly Tribune comes, Saturday, and I have 
read old Greeley, I will wipe him out." Both of these 
men were clear in their faith, and went to their papers 
for materials of attack and defense. If their papers had 
come preaching strange doctrines, they would have 
been bewildered, but not converted, and abandoning 
the old, would have found new armories filled with 
familiar weapons. 

In speaking upon a theme which inspires so much 
enthusiasm, and where the wildest statement seems 
tame beside the truth, it has become common to claim 
that the Press has superseded the pulpit, annihilated 
the orator, relegated to the realm of tradition the pic- 
ture of the "listening Senate," which has fired to high 
ambition the youth of preceding generations, and so 
elevated and educated the masses, that great men and 
great leaders, the Websters, Clays, and Calhouns of the 
past, will never more appear. But nothing can take the 
place of the spoken word, the magnetism and thrill, 
the nameless combination of power and personality, by 
which the speaker sways his audience, and leaves im- 
pressions which follow to the grave. If his message is 
of moment, the newspapers repeat and drop it into 
millions of minds, and the light of his revelation radi- 



CHA UNCE V M. DEPE IV. 379 

ates through the Republic. In the red-hot days of anti- 
slavery strife, an editorial or pamphlet from the pen of 
Wendell Phillips, cast anonymously into the discussion, 
served in the ranks; but if Wendell Phillips made a 
speech, the spirit which pervaded the hall, following the 
telegraph and reproduced in the Press, brought the 
whole country to its feet, and the clash of contending 
opinions shook the Union. There were other and able 
contemporary speeches and writings, but this was the 
triumph of the orator. Exceptionally great men have 
disappeared from American public life, and the dreary 
drivel of ordinary legislative debate produces an insati- 
able longing for the fresh vigor of the newspaper arti- 
cles of which it is a thin paraphrase. How many con- 
gressional orators are there, the announcement of whose 
names for a speech at Cooper Institute would fill the 
hall and whose utterances would command the full at- 
tention of the Press? The position of Representatives 
gives no social distinction, while the time required to 
properly fill the functions of legislating for fifty millions 
of people ruins the opportunity for professional or 
business success. The Websters and Clays and Cal- 
houns are editing newspapers, practising law, or con- 
trolling the great business enterprises of the times. The 
causes underlying this are too radical to be investigated 
here, but they are a great present and future danger to 
the dignity of the public service, and the equal growth 
of the Government and the laws with the marvelous 
development of the country. But the Press has not 
made the existence of such men impossible ; for no- 
where is it stronger than in Great Britain, and Glad- 
stone and John Bright command the attention of the 



380 0/iA TIOiVS AND SPEECHES OF 

world ; nowhere more brilliant than in France, and Gam- 
betta moved with equal power the Senate and the popu- 
lace, and the young Republic, borne down by his death, 
rose only by a mighty struggle from his grave. 

In this age, when the mighty movements of business 
require strong combinations of men and capital ; when 
the value of a single newspaper is reckoned by millions ; 
in stagnant times, monopoly furnishes a topic ever fresh, 
and at all times provides the happy conditions under 
which the drum and trumpet of the professional ter- 
rorist never fails to draw a crowd at the corner, to 
whom, after having swallowed his famous mixture in 
equal parts of a down-trodden people and a subsidized 
Press, he can exhibit his always successful performance 
of asphyxiation by fright, from which recovery is only 
possible by jingling the contribution box. But while 
a free Press exists, monopoly is impossible. It can dis- 
perse the most courageous combination, and frighten 
the largest capital. Under its assaults, moving to ac- 
tion the people and every agency of government, the 
inevitable issue is reformation, dissolution, or bank- 
ruptcy. 

Within the past year, the momentary alarm, lest a 
combination might be formed strong enough to mo- 
nopolize the Press, illustrated the popular appreciation 
of the inestimable value of this essential liberty, and 
demonstrated that the newspaper can no more be cor- 
nered or controlled than the air we breathe, or the ele- 
ments of the immortality of the soul. The Press at any 
center which to-day failed to reflect public opinion and 
protect the public interests, would be followed to- 
morrow by new issues meeting the popular demand 



CHA UNCE Y M. DEPE W. 381 

and receiving the popular support. The country Press 
Hves and thrives notwithstanding the overshadowing 
influence of the great metropohtan journals. It was 
never so vigorous, able, and independent as it is to-day. 
It voices the needs of its neighborhood, and speaks 
with power upon all general questions. Its collective 
expression is the common judgment of the country. 

The critical, creative, and educational efforts of the 
Press have reacted upon itself; but the highest and 
most deserved compliment which can be paid the news- 
paper is that it has steadily kept in the van of develop- 
ment and progress. In the sternest application of the 
doctrine of the survival of the fittest, it has nothing to 
fear. It is constantly enlarging the demands to be 
made upon itself, and exhausting every field of thought 
and inquiry, and ransacking every corner of the globe 
to satisfy them. The public insists that its reviews of 
books shall be as comprehensive as an article of Macau- 
lay's ; that its report of a convention of specialists shall 
condense and present the latest discoveries of science ; 
that its account of a military campaign shall be written 
by a correspondent who passed upon the field through 
all the perils of the fight, and whose description shall 
excel in accuracy and precede in time the official re- 
port. Thus, by the very law of its being, in its perfect 
freedom, it teaches the teacher, instructs the scientist, 
and runs the Government. The present generation has 
not the robust vigor of the last. They reveled in the 
ponderous editorials of the National Intelligencer, and 
waded with delight through dreary dissertations signed 
by Publius and Agricola, and all the well-known names 
in the Roman Directory. A first-class freight train 



382 OKA TIOxVS AND SPEECHES Of 

could not now carry the weight of one of those papers. 
Spend one day among the old files, and then an hour 
with our great metropolitan journals, and it will do 
more than all else to cure sentimental regrets for the 
good old times, and promote devout thanksgivings for 
the intellectual life and light of the Nineteenth Cent- 
ury. And one thing which particularly marks the pres- 
ent newspaper on its human side is its humor. This 
best of faculties given by God, to cheer a journey beset 
under the most favorable conditions with many trials 
and discouragements, long held in contempt, has at last 
assumed its proper place. The funny editor has ceased 
to be a clown and has become a power. His column 
is the one first read and most enjoyed or dreaded. 
Unsupported, he takes a local paper at Danbury or 
Galveston or Toledo, or Burlington or Milwaukee or 
Detroit, and gives it a national circulation. He fills 
with clippings the most obscure weekly, and upon the 
editorial page of the largest daily enforces the lesson 
that the man or cause must be ti^ebly entrenched in 
honesty and justice that can withstand the power of 
ridicule. 

As a people we are more intense, more absorbed in 
business, live under a greater strain, and have fewer 
holidays and recreations than any other nation. An 
American crowd out for enjoyment is a melancholy 
spectacle, because it cannot shake off its cares, though 
none so quickly appreciates and keenly enjoys humor. 
It is for the newspapers to cease to rebuke and to give 
it some encouragement in public life. It is but the en- 
forcement of a well-worn argument to furnish the fright- 
ful examples of Tom Corwin and his might-have-been, 



CHA UNCE V M. DEPE W. 383 

if he had never laughed, or how many years ago Proc- 
ter Knott might have reached the Governorship of 
Kentucky, if he had not spoken upon Duluth. It only 
needs to sit in the gallery and listen to the common- 
place platitudes of some Senator or Member gifted 
with mother-wit, but afraid of his dignity, to understand 
the capacity of men to become useless and tedious 
bores. It only needs, in order to appreciate the force of 
the full exercise of all natural endowments and its re- 
ward, to read the story of Abraham Lincoln. 

The most important effect of its liberty and growth 
upon the Press itself, has been to elevate journalism 
from a trade to one of the liberal professions. Train- 
ing as well as aptitude is necessary for success. Few 
men, comparatively, think they are fitted to be law- 
yers, doctors, or clergymen, but there is no one in the 
United States, of reasonable age, who doubts his abili- 
ty to occupy the editorial chair. The great mass of 
young men entering the world from the colleges every 
year have it in their minds to do newspaper work, if 
nothing better offers. Briefless barristers and bron- 
chial ministers are perpetual candidates for possible 
vacancies. These constitute that vast herd which Hor- 
ace Greeley used to consign to Coventry under the 
generic term of "horned cattle." Every name eminent 
in literature or politics in this country, or in England, 
is to be found upon the list of contributors, but they 
were not editors. For them it was a highway tempo- 
rarily opened by necessity or opportunity. If more 
hardly pressed by thronging thousands than other vo- 
cations, it has the larger field from which to select the 
best. While the equipment of the editor differs wide- 



3^4 ORATION AND SPEECHES OP 

\y from that of the other professions, in a sense it in- 
cludes them all. While his privileges are great, his 
motto should be the old chivalric one of Noblesse 
oblige. I have been acquainted, under circumstances 
of more or less intimacy, with most of the prominent 
men in every department of life during the past quar- 
ter of a century, but in readiness and versatility of re- 
source, in the power of instant and intense industry at 
will, in the ability to bring at once and upon call all 
their resources and information to the question at hand, 
in the rare faculty of watching and thinking at the same 
moment, none of them have compared with Horace 
Greeley and Henry J. Raymond. 

The first American editor set his own types himself, 
worked off his edition upon his press and distributed 
his papers in person. One hundred and twenty-three 
years have passed, and now the great machines which 
are the marvels of modern invention throw out four 
million copies of dailies and twenty-eight millions of 
weeklies. Ninety-eight years ago the first daily news- 
paper was started in New York, and now there are one 
hundred and fifteen in this State and one thousand in 
the country. It was three weeks after the Declaration 
of Independence was proclaimed in Philadelphia before 
it reached Thomas Jefferson's newspaper at Williams- 
burg; now Puck's girdle about the world in forty min- 
utes, transformed from airy phantasy to sober fact, 
prints in the morning journal the stor}^ of the day as it 
has happened in every land and clime under the sun. 
Spurgeon's Sunday sermon in London appears in a 
Chicago newspaper on Monday, and, for the first time 
in history, within the present week a Chinese ambassa- 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. 3^5 

dor in Europe has revealed to a reporter the secrets of 
Celestial diplomacy, to be cabled and printed the same 
day in a New York journal. 

The great factor of modern civilization is association. 
It has bridged rivers and seas, it has constructed the 
railroad and the telegraph, it has made possible politi- 
cal revolutions, state and municipal reforms, sacred, 
scientific, and social progress. It solves the problem of 
how the unlimited power and unrestricted liberty of 
the Press shall be maintained with safety to the commu- 
nity. This anniversary marks the thirty-third year, the 
Hmit set for a generation, of your existence. The laws 
of your association, written and unwritten, are the life 
of its members, and upon the broad principles of your 
charter rest the purity and dignity of your profession 
and the security and fostering care of the vast trust 
committed to your keeping. 



386 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 



XXXI. 

A Talk to Young Physicians — Address to 
THE Graduating Class of the Syracuse 
Medical College, June 14, 1888. 



Ladies and Gentlemen: 

It is an anomalous situation for a man who is rush- 
ing by express trains to the political convention which 
is to name the next President of the United States, to 
be diverted from his course into a quiet by-way of study 
and literature ; but having in mind the dangers and ac- 
cidents of politics, it may be wise for him to make 
friends with the medical profession. Certainly, there 
could be no safer retreat to start from or return to than 
a college commencement. Graduating day is the most 
interesting period in life. It crystallizes in deathless 
memory the pleasures of the past and the aspirations 
of the future. Behind is the dream ; before the awaken, 
ing. Student years form a romance which grows in 
interest and beauty as you recede from them, and all 
experiences afterward are the harsh realities of a career. 
Whether you succeed or fail, the associations which 
end to-night will be the one asset upon which the sheriff 
cannot levy, and which no fortune could tempt you to 
part with. 

The vocation chosen by a young man is governed 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. 3^7 

oftener by accident than inclination. But the manner 
in which it is pursued is controlled neither by luck nor 
chance. The liberal professions are crowded with in- 
competents. I know ministers who should be palace- 
car conductors, poor lawyers who would have been 
good drummers or clerks, and medical men who are 
more dangerous to their patients than the disease they 
treat, who were destined by nature for the farm or the 
factory. The world is a workshop full of misfits, and 
misfits are always cheap. It requires both faculty and 
courage when you have discovered your mistake to 
drop your tools and start again ; but if all the doctors, 
lawyers, and ministers who never can get on in their 
professions would get out and find other fields of labor, 
it would be infinitely better for themselves and the 
country. A living stream of new applicants for public 
favor and support pours through the portals of the 
schools of medicine, law, and theology. It is estimated 
that doctors are thus manufactured in such large num- 
bers that they form one to every three hundred inhabi- 
tants. At first view this seems very discouraging, but 
the situation has many compensations. So many are 
wholly unfit or badly prepared, that while they increase 
the miseries of mankind they add to the business and 
profits of those who are capable. The competitions 
of modern life have become so keen that there are no 
opportunities for the lame and the lazy. The first 
must find their proper pursuits, and the second must 
work or go to the wall. 

I have no faith in mottos or maxims or rules for suc- 
cess, and though often asked, never have any to give. 
A young man who has good health and governs his 



388 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

conduct by a conscientious answer to the ever-present 
question, Would my mother approve? and gives tire- 
less attention to his business, is certain to succeed. It 
is impossible for every one to win fame or fortune 
or both, but the man who earns a living, even in a 
very modest way, feels the inspiration of independence 
and has safely passed the precipice of failure. Repi- 
nings for riches and angry envy of prosperity weaken 
the moral tone and mental fiber. They paralyze effort 
and end in empty vaporings in the bar-room and empty 
larders at home. The opportunities for accumulating 
large fortunes rarely come to the members of the liber- 
al professions. Their compensations are in the posi- 
tion and influence accorded to their culture and train- 
ing. With them, self-support is success, and when the 
surplus surely comes and with it home, larger comforts, 
and fair competence for declining years, they enjoy a 
measure of happiness and content rarely found with 
the use and care of great wealth. 

I have learned both by experience and observation 
that the only real and lasting enjoyment in life is to be 
found in work. Everything which man creates decays 
when neglected, but nothing in nature or art goes to 
pieces so fast as man in idleness. The conditions of 
health, happiness, development, mental, moral, and 
physical vigor and unimpaired faculties for old age, 
are found only in the full exercise of all our powers to 
the limit of their capacity. I know men who were 
completed when they graduated. Their thought and 
talk have never gotten beyond college politics and the 
rivalries of the secret societies. They are human phono- 
graphs, and the echo of their undergraduate voices of a 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. 3^9 

bygone generation touches no sympathetic chord in 
the activities of to-day. Such men have always been 
nerveless idlers and in middle life are hopeless failures. 
Sir Henry Holland, when past eighty, returning from 
his annual vacation to find his carriage awaiting him at 
the depot, and completing his round of calls upon his 
patients before reaching his house ; Mr. Gladstone, at 
seventy-eight, more diligent in public duty than any 
member of his party, and yet finding time for excur- 
sions in the classics, modern languages, and the scien- 
ces, and to maintain a controversy in defense of the 
Bible and Christianity, furnish unanswerable testimony 
to the sustaining and regenerating power of work. 
When a young man is sure that he has found the call- 
ing best suited to his abilities and training, whether the 
professions or the farm, business, or mechanical indus- 
try, three rules will invariably carry him through,— 
stick, dig, and save. 

In a republic Vv^ork is honorable, and a man has no 
place in the community and receives little of its con- 
sideration unless he contributes something to the move- 
ment of the complicated machinery of society. The 
effect of our American example is seen all over Europe. 
It has given to labor recognition and dignity in coun- 
tries where formerly, and within recent recollection, it 
was a badge of servitude. 

But while every pursuit has its claim upon the gen- 
eral welfare, the profession you have chosen is entitled 
to more than ordinary consideration. Necessarily 
experimental, it furnishes boundless opportunity for 
cranks and frauds. Human suffering is an easy field 
for quacks who live upon the credulous and the weak. 



39° ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

The strongest natures, when overtaken by disease, are 
easily imposed upon by the confident promise of health. 
It is only in curing the sick that profit and prosperity 
come soonest to the most brazen pretender. But the 
profession, with rare courage and sacrifice, has always 
been true to its ideals and to progress. It has waged 
unceasing warfare against the mysterious, which fools 
the ignorant and degrades the standard of practice. 
Its history is one perpetual trial of suggestions and dis- 
coveries, and it has subjected them all to severest tests, 
rejecting the false and adopting the true. It refuses 
gain which comes with deceit, and mercilessly disciplines 
the offenders against its code. The marvelous advances 
in the healing art, by which suffering has been allevi- 
ated, life prolonged, and human happiness immeasura- 
bly increased, have been due to the conscientious 
devotion of physicians to that nobler side of their 
work by which their brethren and the world receive 
at once and without hindrance or cost the benefit of 
their discoveries. 

The history of medicine is the story of civilization. 
The standard of the profession is the barometer of the 
cultured intelligence of the country. As the Greeks 
were the most refined and best educated of all the na- 
tions of antiquity; as they so excelled in art and litera- 
ture that their works remain the models for all genera- 
tions; as they alone of the ancients questioned all 
things and dismissed what could not be proved ; so 
their doctors became the founders of a medical system 
which was vigorous enough to outlive the ages and elas- 
tic enough to embrace the developments of time. 
Esculapius, "the blameless physician," in the heroic 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. 39 1 

period made medicine a mystery and became a god ; 
while Hippocrates, in the Hght of Attic civilization, 
gave the world in nearly a hundred books the results of 
all the researches of the past, and is venerated as the 
"Father of Medicine." During the conquering and bar- 
barous times of the evolution of the Roman, the physi- 
cian was a slave, and the fate of torture or freedom 
sharpened the wits of a knave, but in the Augustan age 
he was the honored companion of the Emperor and his 
contributions led in the advance of science and dis- 
covery. In the dark ages the profession again fell into 
the depths of superstition and was filled with impos- 
tors, but in the glorious awakening and emancipation 
of the mind which followed the invention of printing, 
the school of medicine grew to be the noblest depart- 
ment of the university. The progress of science and 
invention, which is the marvel of this century, is fully 
equaled by the less heralded advance of medicine. 
The blameless physician and Grecian deity would find 
his supernatural powers paralyzed in the presence of 
one of your final examination papers, and Hippocrates 
and Galen would be compelled by this learned faculty 
to enter as freshmen and take a full course before they 
could receive an honorary degree. With Americans 
the faculty of reverence has attached to it scientific in- 
quiry and philosophic research. We worship the fath- 
ers, but we idealize them first. If we can adopt the 
maxims, the examples, or the principles of antiquity, 
they are all the better because they are old, but for us 
age sanctifies nothing. We have passed the period of 
the superstition which ascribed miraculous power to 
the seventh son of the seventh son. He cured disease 



392 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

by putting the plaster on himself; we reverse the pro- 
cess and put the plaster on the patient. 

In no state or country has the progress of your pro- 
fession been more remarkable than in New York. 
While searching the records of this Dutch colony for 
quite another purpose, I found this historically valu- 
able entry under date of February 5, 1652: "The Col- 
onial Council order that ship's doctors arriving at the 
port of New Amsterdam shall not be permitted to prac- 
tice medicine or surgery without the consent of Doc- 
tor La Montaigne." The good doctor was the only 
physician on Manhattan Island. Orders of the Coun- 
cil were equivalent to statutes, and this was the first law 
for the protection of American industry ever passed on 
this continent. In the midst of the heated controver- 
sies of the hour on this great question, you gentlemen 
may congratulate yourself that the Father of American 
Medicine was also the founder of our protective sys- 
tem. One hundred years after, in 1765, King's Col- 
lege in New York had a medical department, and Dr. 
John Jones, its Professor of Surgery, published a work 
upon field hospitals and the treatment of the wounded, 
which was the text-book of the staff during the Revo- 
lutionary War, and its suggestions were adopted by 
the army surgeons of the veteran armies of Europe. 
Now it is the just pride of our State that its medical 
colleges in equipment and instruction compare favora- 
bly with the world-famed schools of Vienna, London, 
and Paris. 

I congratulate your city upon the possession of a 
school of such high standard and character. Far- 
sighted energy and enterprise have made Syracuse an 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. 393 

important industrial center, and its solid growth in the 
past fifty years has been phenomenal. But there comes 
a period in the life of every prosperous community 
when its successful citizens must recognize the debt 
they owe to society, and the highest interests to them- 
selves and their children are best served by intelligent 
and open-handed liberality. A noble band of public- 
spirited physicians give time and hard work here, prac- 
tically without charge, that this community may not 
be cursed by badly equipped and incompetent doctors. 
They require a year more in their curriculum than their 
rivals. They know that the rush of students is to the 
places where they can quickest receive their diplomas. 
But this faculty, preferring perfection to profit, and 
quality to quantity, made a degree from Syracuse a 
guarantee of faithful study, and ability skillfully to 
treat injuries and diseases. The Vanderbilt endow- 
ment of a million of dollars, the Carnegie and Loomis 
gifts, each of many hundreds of thousands, have done 
much to plant in New York City the best opportuni- 
ties in the United States for a medical education. In- 
dividually or by combined action you have among your 
citizens the men who should build upon this noble 
foundation. Give to this college a building worthy of 
your city, let it have a hospital and dispensary for the 
most beneficent of charitable work and medical train- 
ing; equip it with the most advanced appliances for 
physiological, anatomical, and chemical work, and you 
will have in your midst an institution which will be an 
enduring honor to your city and a source of incalcula- 
ble benefits and blessing to the suffering in all condi- 
tions and to the poor. 



394 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

The progressive spirit of this institution happily rec- 
ognizes that among the many avenues opening for work 
for woman, medicine should give her a cordial welcome. 
As a nurse she is always the comforting and minister- 
ing angel of the sick-room, and the opportunities for 
her usefulness as a physician are as boundless as the 
complex ills which flesh is heir to. 

The students who have this day been graduated 
should remember that their first duty is to keep so fully 
up with the best thoughts and most valuable discov- 
eries in every field of activity that they cannot be nar- 
rowed by their specialty. To-day all the resources of 
science are devoted to the discovery of new remedies, 
and nature has no secret or sanctuary safe from the as- 
saults of the indomitable seekers after truth. Daring 
experimentalists are testing and finding healing virtues 
in the venom of deadly reptiles, and the mineral and 
vegetable kingdoms are constantly forced to yield cura- 
tive elements of priceless value to the pharmacopoeia. 
The doctor who simply marches abreast of the progress 
of his profession must be broadly educated and a dis- 
criminating student. It will be many years before 
your practice occupies all your time, and this is your 
golden opportunity. Sir Astley Cooper, the most fa- 
mous of English surgeons, received in fees his first year 
$25. At the end of six years his practice netted only 
$600, but in his fifteenth year a patient flung into his 
lap a check for $5000 for a single operation, and his 
income grew from that time until it reached $100,000. 
You will not all be Sir Astley Coopers, but your early 
struggles may be cheered by his story. The Emperor 
Augustus granted to doctors only, of all the citizens of 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEiV. 39^ 

Rome, the exemption of their property from taxation. 
I suppose the imperial treasury did not lose much by 
this generosity, but I hope you may be so prosperous 
that you will long for the return of the Augustan Age. 
Keep in mind Daniel Webster's famous remark to the 
young man who complained that the profession was 
overcrowded: "There is plenty of room at the top." 

During the period when you have little to do, read ; 
upon some method if you can — if not, read without 
method. The process not only broadens a man with a 
wealth of varied information, and a view of the whole 
field of knowledge, but it suggests congenial excursions 
into politics, theology, philosophy, and sociology which 
invigorate and fertilize the mind, and give a stronger 
grasp on your profession. It does more ; it stores away 
in the memory an exhaustless stock of incalculable value 
in busier years. Acquire the habits of improving the 
odd minutes. The majority of men employ the un- 
avoidable waits, between the scenes of our daily family 
drama, in preparing for either the idiot or the insane 
asylum. They do nothing and think less, or get mad. 
They are the types of the friend we know so well who 
spoils the trip or party by storming first about, and then 
at, the one who is the cause of the delay, or of the good 
deacon who responded to his pastor's earnest compli- 
ment that, no matter who slept, he was always awake 
and attentive: "Yes, doctor, when you are preachin", 
I sits and thinks of nothin'." The cause is always your 
sweetheart or your wife. Women are rarely prompt, 
and the reason is either the bonnet or the baby. Ac- 
cept the inevitable as a special dispensation of Provi- 
dence. Take up your book and read until she appears 



39^ ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

Then do not swear or rave, but compliment her cordial- 
ly; she deserves it; and if you have the high privilege, 
also kiss her, and you will both doubly enjoy the enter- 
tainment or the journey, and in time the things read 
during these intervals will prove a liberal education. 
As soon as you are able to support a wife, marry. God 
and nature bless the union. Real happiness and the 
growth and preservation of all the virtues are best 
found in the family and home. But many a promising 
career has been spoiled by recklessly assuming the bur- 
dens of a household without adequate income. It often 
mortgages and weights a man so that he cannot pursue 
his profession, and. under pretense of affection, he de- 
ceives his wife and inflicts upon her untold privations 
and misery. 

His education and opportunity give a physician un- 
usual influence in the community. He cannot escape 
the responsibilities of citizenship, and is specially 
charged with high public duties. He has the training 
of a leader, and holds confidential relations to a large 
constituency. He should always be a partisan, but 
will rarely find excuse for the practice of mugwumpery. 
Hostile political parties, ever watchful and critical of 
each other, are the safeguards of liberty. Within the 
organization he can become a potential factor for re- 
form and the nomination of the best men. But doctors 
cannot accept ofiice without losing their patients. 
Their relations are purely personal and confidential, and 
cannot be delegated to a partner or friend. Physicians 
and railroad men are about the only people who must 
abandon their business when they enter the public ser- 
vice. If they do conclude to sacrifice private emolu- 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. 397 

ment for official honors, the one finds his calHng no 
disqualification, while the other is informed that for his 
vocation the spirit which hung witches, banished Bap- 
tists, and branded Quakers still actively survives. 

The profession of medicine is peculiarly rich in in- 
spiring examples and courageous charity. The fury of 
the fighting upon the battle-field makes cowards brave 
and brave men heroes. But amid flying shot and burst- 
ing shells, in the calm and cool possession of every fac- 
ulty, the surgeons face death in the presence of hor- 
rors which appall the stoutest hearts. No soldier lead- 
ing a forlorn hope ever presented a tithe of the sus- 
tained daring of the doctors who have repeatedly left 
homes and dear ones to meet the deadly pestilence in 
the plague-stricken cities of our land. Their deeds were 
unheralded. No trumpets inspired the charge. The 
only sounds which greeted them were the despairing 
cries of the sick and the groans of the dying. Fame 
had for them no promise, and their only reward was 
the consciousness of duty nobly done. We live in a 
charitable age. Vast sums are yearly given to found 
and endow educational institutions, to build hospitals 
and to equip houses and asylums for the helpless and 
unfortunate. But the gratuitous services rendered by 
physicians every day to the poor are larger contribu- 
tions in proportion to their incomes and estates than 
any of the noble donations which have given fame to 
the generous. They meet the requirements of the 
purest benevolence, for the left hand literally knoweth 
not what the right hand doeth. 

I read and read again the "Vicar of Wakefield." and 
it seems to me the most beautiful idyl in our literature. 



398 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

And yet the life of every conscientious doctor presents 
a picture full of romance in the realities of his experi- 
ence, of character which strengthens the weak, of 
bright and breezy hopefulness which encourages the des- 
pairing, and of deeds and thoughts which so sanctify 
him that his presence elevates society. 1 owe much to 
such a one at whose house in my student days I was 
always a welcome guest, and whose philosophy of life, 
so genial and quaint, as he soliloquized during the rides 
on his daily rounds, was far better than any lessons 
which came to me from my learned professors. Such 
a man is the community's best friend. At the festival 
he is the soul of the entertainment, and in the house 
of mourning or distress he is the source of comfort and 
help. He is the confidant of all the lovers, makes up 
their quarrels, and secures their happiness. He dis- 
covers the skeleton in the family closet, and drags it 
out and buries it ; he brings husband and wife together 
and saves them from separation and disgrace. He 
finds out the promise of the boy, and successfully plans 
a way for carrying him through college and for the 
acquirement of a profession. He has the confidence 
of quarreling neighbors, and, as arbitrator or common 
friend, adjusts their differences and brings them to- 
gether. In his daily walk and conversation he preaches 
from a perambulating pulpit lessons, principles, max- 
ims, doctrines, and proverbs, which in time form a large 
part of the opinions and virtue of his constituency. 

The rush and worry, the wear and tear, the rapid 
pace of our American life irritates our nerves and ren- 
ders us peculiarly sensitive to impressions. The per- 
sonality of the doctor, his disposition, his habits, and 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. 399 

his character, form a large part of his success or failure. 
The vain and pompous doctor, who thinks so much of 
himself that he fails to appreciate the weakness and 
watchfulness of the sick, leaves behind him a sense of 
neglect and indifference which neutralizes his medicine. 
The discursive and argumentative doctor airs his opin- 
ions on politics or theology to aching bones and fevered 
brains until only weakness keeps the outraged victim 
from murder. The grossest injury to the helpless pa- 
tient, absorbing with every breath the spirit of her en- 
vironment, is the polluting presence of the doctor sat- 
urated with whiskey or tobacco. But when the clean, 
cheerful, and hopeful physician enters the room, he 
brings in comfort and health. The sufferer knows that 
this man is able and skillful, that his brain and heart 
are full of the case, that his sympathies follow his 
efforts, and the potentiality of his powders is intensified 
by the inspiring magnetism of his personality. He is 
welcomed with faith, and blessings follow his departure. 
He exorcises despair and is the victor over death. 

Gentlemen, we of the world bid you hail and God- 
speed. Let this prayer of your friends be the moving 
purpose of your lives: That you will be devoted to the 
best interests, to the purity and progress of your noble 
profession, and reflect honor upon your Alma Mater. 



400 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 



XXXII. 

ADDRESS AT THE TENTH ANNUAL MEETING OF 
THE Board of Management of the Bank 
Clerks' Mutual Benefit Association of 
THE City of New York, December 3, 1878. 



Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen: 

It seems to me eminently fit and proper that this 
Association, connected as it is with the bank system of 
the country, should hold its annual meeting in the de- 
clining hours of the present year. For the past twelve 
months the institutions to which you belong, and your- 
selves, have been peculiarly upon trial before the Ameri- 
can people. It has been widely proclaimed throughout 
the country that the national banks were the minions 
of despotism, and their officers the instruments of 
tyranny. Orators have said before applauding audi- 
ences that the institution ought to be abolished, and 
the employees ought to be hung. I congratulate you 
that the enlightened sentiment of the American people 
has found that one of the wisest of our institutions is 
the National Bank, and that universally it is managed 
with ability and with integrity. And from the report 
of the President here to-night, and the expression upon 
the faces of the bank officers and employees whom I see 
within this hall, I feel assured that they have no fears 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. 401 

in regard to the continuance of their institutions, or 
the perpetuity, until its natural end, of their individual 
existences. You belong, gentlemen of the banking fra- 
ternity, to one of the oldest guilds into which society 
divides itself when once organized. From the earliest 
dawn of history there has been a finance system. 
There is no study so interesting and so improving to 
the individual in his social and domestic relations, to 
the merchant in his trade and commerce, to the states- 
man providing for the welfare of his country, as a sound 
system of finance. Job was familiar with bankers in 
his prosperity, and knew usurers in his adversity. The 
Bible mentions both in the Old Testament — bankers 
and lawyers — but nowhere speaks in complimentary 
terms of either. I have endeavored to find some rea- 
son for this. One may have been that the ancestors of 
our profession were not worthy of commendation ; but 
I think the better and more reasonable view to take is 
that eighteen hundred years of Christianity, culture, 
and progress have brought the world up to the proper 
appreciation of both bankers and lawyers. In pagan 
times, when there were wealth and commerce, the 
temples of the gods served for banks. The great shrine 
of a Diana at Ephesus, and the more famous one of 
Apollo at Delphi, were the safe-deposits of the com- 
panies of antiquity, in which peasants and princes left 
their possessions for safe keeping, which received money 
and paid interest upon it, and loaned money to those 
who wanted it ; but they proved that bankers, as such, 
make poor churchmen, and churchmen who are wholly 
such make poor bankers; for greed overcame piety, 
and with the loss of piety there fled reverence for the 



402 , Orations and speeches of 

depository, and both were robbed. Gibbon says that 
the few hundred years of the height of Roman imperial 
power were the happiest of human days, and the happi- 
est men of all that period — in that gross, materialistic 
view — were the Roman bankers. The power under 
which they prospered stretched out its arms until it 
embraced all known climes and all known people, and 
the vast tribute of the world, pouring into the Eternal 
City, was controlled by the bankers. They were gov- 
erned by no laws of usury. Money was merchandise, 
and was governed by the trade value of the hour; and 
they accumulated fortunes, and lived in splendor and 
magnificence, and surrounded themselves with the sen- 
suous enjoyment of art and sculpture, in a manner which 
their successors have never equaled. In all time com- 
merce has been successful, and has prospered only in 
those places where sound and honest finance presided. 
At various times in the history of the world, its great 
trade centers have been Geneva, Florence, Venice. 
Amsterdam, Holland, England ; but in each, whenever 
speculation, through prosperity, has outrun the ability 
to meet the promise when it became due, then, in the 
inevitable crash which followed. Commerce and Pros- 
perity have both folded their wings and flown to that 
spot where they could find wiser and better treatment. 
There is nothing so inspiring, nothing which produces 
such high endeavor and grand results in this world, 
both to nations and to trades and professions, as an 
honorable background of glorious achievement ; and 
it is one of the incentives that to-day make banking so 
honorable, and make the profession the synonym of 
high integrity and truthfulness, that for so many ages 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. ^<^l 



it has accomplished such important results, and pro- 
duced such mighty and powerful men. In this country 
we have but a hundred years of national life, yet into 
that hundred years we have crowded such progress, 
such magnitude of achievement, such history and revo- 
lution, that those hundred years present a spectacle 
and a background equal to a thousand years of more 
peaceful states. And yet so recent is our ancestry that 
all nationalities look beyond our dawn to the lands from 
whence they sprang for inspiration. 

The Irish go back to Ireland to hear poetry, and 
song, and eloquence; the English point to Magna 
Charta, and the common law, and Shakespeare, and 
Milton ; the Dutch point to civil and religious liberty 
as their contribution ; and, while we are indebted to all 
the countries for all they have done, it is the pride, the 
glory, the special boast of the bankers of New York, 
that they have contributed more to the finance of the 
Old World than they have derived from it. It is the 
wisdom of the banking system of New York which has 
made her imperial among her sister States, and made 
her metropolis the financial center of this contment. 
It was in New York and out of her experience, that the 
true system of modern banking was evolved : that the 
paper promise of the bank should be met, not m the 
vaults of the bank, but by public funds held by the 
State to redeem it, whatever became of the banks. 

When Sir Robert Peel, succeeding as finance mmis- 
ter to the control of the destinies of England, after 
years of bankruptcy and disaster, and years of an irre- 
deemable paper currency, saw the effects of this system 
of New York, he instantly incorporated tt m the finance 



404 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

system of the old country, and from that day to this 
there have never been those old and terrible commer- 
cial revulsions in Great Britain ; and from that day to 
this the Bank of England note has never been discred- 
ited or dishonored. And when the United States Gov- 
ernment needed, in its trial, a system large enough and 
elastic enough to meet its great and expansive needs, 
it looked to New York and adopted as the national 
system the well-tried system of our own State. Prior 
to that, how was it? Why, in the old days of the State 
laws, every man, when he engaged in a transaction, 
whether it was great or small, took his pocket-book on 
one side and his "bank-note detector" on the other; 
and before he concluded the transaction, he looked over 
the "detector" to see whether the bill he received be- 
longed to a bank that had burst the day before, and ere 
the sun went down he got rid of that bill, for fear it 
would be a worthless piece of paper in his pocket, 
because it was the bill of a bank that would burst 
before the morrow. But under the system of New 
York, adopted into our national system, no such results 
are any longer feared. In our ordinary relations, in 
our trifling domestic concerns, in our great commer- 
cial transactions, we do not care whether the national 
bank-note in our pocket or in our hand was issued by 
the bank of California or Maine; we do not care 
whether by an institution in the mountains of Colorado 
or in the northwestern wilderness; we know that Uncle 
Samuel holds the bond that will pay it, whatever be- 
comes of the bank. 

I remember once hearing Mr. Lincoln tell a story of 
the New York bankers. He said that when the Merri- 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEIV. 405 

mac escaped from Hampton Roads, and scattered our 
little wooden navy as if they had been skiffs and row- 
boats, and when it was thought that within a week she 
would be in the harbor of New York, levying tribute 
on the city, the bankers of New York went down to 
see about it ; and Mr. Lincoln narrated how the door 
of the audience room opened, and in they came, in 
black broadcloth and immaculate linen, and their spokes- 
man arose and said : "Mr. President, we represent three 
hundred millions of dollars. The gentlemen compos- 
ing this committee are worth fifty millions themselves. 
The Merrimac within a week will be destroying our 
property in New York. We have paid our taxes when- 
ever called upon, and contributed as we thought we 
ought, and we demand that the Government shall do 
something to support us"; and Mr. Lincoln, with that 
peculiar twinkle in his eye, by which he was enabled 
with a few expressions to slide an unwelcome visitor 
out of the door before he knew it, said : "Gentlemen, 
the Government is in serious straits. It has done all 
that it can do. It has no money, and its credit is bad- 
ly impaired; but if I had as much money as you say 
you have got, and I was as 'skeered' as you seem to be, I 
would go back to New York and do something or other 
to take care of that property myself." Now while Mr. 
Lincoln in that jocose way-becausc he could do noth- 
ing else-got rid of this committee, yet if he had been 
asked to express his real opinion as to services which 
the banks and bankers of New York had rendered to 
the nation, it would have been one of unaffected admi- 
ration and praise, because it was the banks of New ^ ork 
which subscribed for the first fifty millions of dollars that 



4o6 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

paid the arrearages to the troops, and enabled the con- 
test to go on in the great Civil War; and from time to 
time, as the credit of the country went down, and as its 
securities depreciated, it was the banks of New York 
which rallied and took them and furnished the funds 
that kept the armies in the field and the navies upon 
the sea, until the unity and nationality of the Republic 
were secured. 

In looking back over the history of the country, and 
recalling its earliest period, we bring forward only those 
names in our imagination which have been famous in 
the field or in the council. Instantly before our eyes 
pass in review the names of Washington and Wayne 
and Greene ; instantly before our eyes pass in review the 
names of Jefferson and Madison and Hamilton; and 
there was one man in the revolutionary era, without 
whose genius and patriotism Washington could not 
have kept his armies in the field, and the Federal Con- 
gress could not have continued its existence. That 
man first contributed his private fortune, and then, with 
a skill and a resource and a genius unparalleled in the 
history of finance, without credit abroad, without re- 
sources at home, he devised the schemes and furnished 
the money that kept the Continental soldiers fed and 
clothed and armed, and kept the few ships upon the 
ocean until independence was secured, and the Repub- 
lic of the United States recognized everywhere; and 
that man was Robert Morris, of Philadelphia — banker. 
And when, in our last great contest, its history comes 
to be written up, and its records read in the future, 
there will, outside of its generals and its statesmen, be 
one name that will shine conspicuous — the name of 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. 40 7 

that cabinet officer who raised the enormous sums and 
devised the systems that did it ; that kept a milHon of 
men in the field until the nationality of the country 
and the perpetuity of its liberty and its institutions 
were secured ; and that man, to whom we will be for- 
ever grateful, was Salmon P. Chase. 

Now then, gentlemen, you are bankers, engaged in 
bank business, and in an avocation which you have 
taken up for a life pursuit ; but in this country, with 
its great opportunities, with its vast demands, with its 
imposing duties upon every citizen, no man, whatever 
his calling, can be a mere specialist. There is no rule 
in this land or this political system which makes one 
man make blades and another handles for jack-knives, 
and do nothing else and know nothing else for all their 
existence. I have a poor opinion of that man who 
carries home to his dinner-table and his fireside his 
books and ledgers and nothing else. I have a poor 
opinion of that man who takes to both places vacuity 
and semi-idiocy. To bank officers, probably more than 
to most business men, opportunities occur. Banking 
hours begin late and they close early; and outside of 
them are the opportunities for that attention to public 
duties, for that broad and liberal culture, for that pur- 
suit of the specialty which accords with taste or which 
we have taken up, that so broadens and enlarges a 
man that he not only becomes greater in the vocation 
he has adopted, but more useful to everybody and 
more grateful to himself. I met last summer, in the 
White Mountains, a gentleman of large affairs, who, 
outside of business, had devoted himself to the micro- 
scope until he had mastered all organic life. I knew a 



4o8 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

man in large business affairs, who, in the hours of the 
morning and evening, became one of the best amateur 
artists of his day; and I have known others to learn 
languages or to have some special talent. To such 
men when shipwreck comes, as it may, in the over- 
throw of the institution in which they work, they do 
not sink down and groan because they cannot find just 
the chair that they sat on all their lives, but in the ver- 
satility of their structure they look around and find 
some plank that floats them safely to the shore. To- 
day, one of the most scientific men in England is 
also one of England's most successful bankers. Samuel 
Rogers managed his banking business to the admiration 
of men in his own vocation, and at the same time so 
cultivated his muse that he gave delight, and still gives 
it to succeeding generations, and is "the banker-poet" 
of all time. 

And, gentlemen, there is one other duty devolving 
upon you on account of your intelligence and position 
in the community, and that is to give dignity and in- 
tegrity to public life. I was dining several years ago, 
when in active public life, with a score of the richest 
men in the city of New York. The conversation ran 
upon taxes, and upon the burdens imposed upon prop- 
erty ; it ran upon the rascality of public life and offi- 
cers, and they declared that no man could be a politi- 
cian and hold office, and at the same time receive the 
confidence or have the respect of the business com- 
munity. I found that not one of those gentlemen had 
ever attended a primary meeting. They never voted 
except on rare occasions, and not one could tell his im- 
mediate representative from his own district in the 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. 409 

municipal or in the state legislature ; and I said to 
them, as I say to all such men now, in this free country, 
which lives only by the intelligence of its masses: "I 
hope you will be taxed and punished until you learn 
that the institutions that rest upon your shoulders 
must be borne by you ; and public life, to be respected, 
must receive from you respect and support." 

Now then, gentlemen, since the organization of banks 
in this city there have been fifty thousand men con- 
nected with them in one way and another. Through 
their hands have passed fifty thousand millions of dol- 
lars. They have been the custodians of the secrets of 
individuals, and of firms, and of corporations. Summon 
them here to-night. Let them stand in grand battle- 
array — this vast army who have served these great 
interests at limited compensation. Call the roll of 
those who have defaulted or been faithless to their 
trust, and they would not make the staff of a major- 
general. It is not for every man to become a Peabody 
or a Morris, but so long as out of the system such men 
came, so long in the system such men reside. It is not 
the conspicuous who alone make success in the world. 
The bank president, no matter how eminent he may be, 
would lose his eminence unless he v/as backed and sup- 
ported and sustained by the integrity and ability of the 
efficient corps who surround him ; and the man who 
diligently performs his duty, however light it may be, 
is fit to receive his own praise, and the promotion to 
follow it when, as it surely will, it comes. One of the 
proudest instances that I know of, in all those that 
stand out among the anecdotes of history, is that of 
the private soldier of France, La Tour d'Auvcrgne. 



4IO ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

He lived to die in the ranks, and yet he won for him- 
self a fame far beyond that of the generals under whom 
he marched. First in the foremost ranks, last in the 
retreat, he fell upon his hundredth battle-field, fighting 
boldly for his country ; and the imperial decree was 
that forever upon the muster of his company his 
name should stand, and that every morning at roll- 
call it should be called, and the sergeant should step 
from his ranks and answer: "Dead upon the field of 
honor." 

Now then, gentlemen, you are met here to-night for 
the purpose of celebrating your first decade. Ten years 
is not long in the history of an institution like yours; 
and yet it is ten years full, as I gather from the report 
of the President, of honorable record, and of charitable, 
admirable deeds. Men perform their duties, not so 
much by the size of the compensation, if it be adequate 
for their wants, as by the certainty of the place and the 
sureness of the compensation. These gentlemen who 
belong to the Association know that their banks will not 
fail. They know their places are secure. They feel 
that promotion will come as the opportunity offers and 
as it is well earned, and this Association seeks to take 
from them that great care that saps the energies of a 
man — the fear that in his age or infirmity, or in his 
death, there may be no provision. The Permanent 
Fund to-night stands $80,000. If these banks knew 
thoroughly their own interests; if these bank-directors 
and stockholders knew thoroughly their own best 
needs, — they would, while reducing their capital, re- 
serve out of the fund which they pay back to the stock- 
holder an amount that would make, before the first of 



CM A U NCR y M. DEPEIV. 4" 

January, that Permanent Fund an even $100,000. And 
I trust that an enhghtened spirit of wisdom and of self- 
interest may lead them to understand that their inter- 
ests are identical with those of this excellent Associa- 
tion ; and I trust that when next you gather, we can 
congratulate you upon a grand success. 



412 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OE 



XXXIII. 

ADDRESS AT THE LAYING OF THE CORNER-STONE 
OF THE College Building given by William 
H. Vanderbilt to the College of Physicians 
and Surgeons, April 24, 1886. 



Ladies and Gentlemen.- 

The most instructive and pleasurable of our public 
assemblies are those which commemorate the better ele- 
ments of our common humanity. The fierce competi- 
tions of our industrial conditions present the possibilities 
of unequal success and provoke the antagonisms which 
threaten social order and security. As the less fortu- 
nate drift into hostility to their more successful breth- 
ren, and those who by their own ability or by inheritance 
have been lifted above the struggles of life lose sight of 
and sympathy with the workers, the internal relations 
of crowded communities become dangerous and intoler- 
able. At this point the man of wealth who founds or 
endows an institution which shall contribute in a large 
and permanent way to the welfare of the people be- 
comes a statesman as well as a philanthropist. He 
brings us back to first principles in this recognition of 
our common origin and interests. We discover that 
what he is all may become, and that at some time he 
or his father began with no other capital than brains. 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. 413 

character, and health. The currents of human sympa- 
thy again flow and throb between the avenue and the 
alley, the cottage and the palace. Each recognizes 
that not by revolution or anarchy, but by the ordinary 
mutations of fortune they may change places, and upon 
the prosperous is impressed the lesson of the responsi- 
bilities of their position, and upon the poor the oppor- 
tunities which are open under our institutions to them- 
selves or their children. 

But how most wisely to invest the money which is 
to carry out a charitable purpose is not an easy prob- 
lem. It is often partly wasted to gratify the vanity 
of the donor. Mr. Vanderbilt had become familiar by 
his own sufferings, so patiently endured that none but 
his intimate friends knew of them, with the beneficent 
effects of medical skill and the possibilities of its growth. 
With his strong common-sense he saw that here was 
practically an untried field where the advancement of 
science might work out the most beneficent and benevo- 
lent ends. Libraries, hospitals, and art and literary 
institutions existed in numbers, each doing in its own 
way admijable work. While in the Old World govern- 
ments fostered schools of medicine, here their only pat- 
■ rons were the profession, and there was not a single 
great endowment in the land. To build a college to 
be called by his name was a temptation, but in a city 
where so many excellent universities already existed, 
he saw that the wiser use of his money was to develop 
and enlarge an old institution whose age, traditions, 
and experience were of incalculable value, and consti- 
tuted a permanent capital which wealth could not cre- 
ate. In selecting the College of Physicians and .Sur- 



414 OJ^A TIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

geons, he chose the oldest, and the equal in rank and 
equipment of the best. The story of this school is 
the history of the progress of medicine in America for 
a hundred years. 

Ninety-nine years ago a small body of young physi- 
cians in this city formed a society with the title of this 
college, declaring that their purpose was "to counteract 
as far as possible the evil influences brought to bear 
upon the profession, to serve the poor, and to improve 
medical science." They established the f^rst free dis- 
pensary New York ever had, and within its walls gave 
gratuitous attendance on the poor, and lectures and 
instruction to students. Four years afterward, in 1791 
they came with a full corps of professors and sixty-one 
students, and a memorial unanimously indorsing them 
from the County Medical Society, to the Regents'^of the 
University of the State of New York, praying to be taken 
under their "protection." The movement inspired im- 
mediate and universal interest. Old doctors bearing 
diplomas from Edinburgh, Paris, and Vienna hailed it 
as the dawn of a new and hopeful era in the progress of 
their profession in the Republic, and to the young it 
was full of brilliant promise. That grizzly and gallant 
warrior and patriot. Baron Steuben, who was a mem- 
ber of the Board of Regents, came down from the ster- 
ile farm which the State had voted him as a reward for 
his services in the Revolutionary War, to examine and 
report, and upon the recommendation of himself and 
his fellow-committeemen the Legislature on the ^4th 
of March, 1791, authorized the Regents in their discre- 
tion to incorporate the College of Physicians and Sur- 
geons, provided its capital did not exceed i:6o,ooo and 



CHA UNCE Y M. DEPE W. 415 

the Regents appointed its professors and conferred its 
degrees. 

Thus successfully started, the young college began 
its prosperous and progressive, but adventurous and 
aggressive career. But its pathway was not clear. The 
Regents approved of this law and appointed a commit- 
tee to prepare a charter for the young university. The 
Trustees of Columbia College protested against the 
granting of this charter on the ground that they were 
authorized to establish a medical school, that they had 
the business much at heart and were proceeding as fast 
as possible, with the prospect and intention of effecting 
all the objects which the rival school could accomplish 
if permitted by the Regents under the Act of 1791. 
They successfully fought off afifirmative action until the 
1 2th of March, 1807, when the coveted charter was se- 
cured. By this charter the Medical Society of the City 
and the County of New York was incorporated as the 
College of Physicians and Surgeons, and Dr. Nicholas 
Romayne — who had originated the first medical school 
in 1787, petitioned for collegiate recognition by the 
State in 1791, and nobly kept the faith till the victory 
of 1807 — became its first President. The contest which 
Columbia College and her medical department began 
in 1792 was now taken up with renewed vigor by the 
Physicians and Surgeons assuming the offensive. They 
demanded that the College school should be merged 
with them, and Columbia recognize the Physicians and 
Surgeons as its medical department. The Regents and 
the Legislature became involved in this contest, and 
the marvelous patience and learning of Chancellor Kent 
were exhausted in an effort to settle it. l?ut it con- 



4l6 ORATWXS AXD SPEECHES OP 

tinued until in 1814 that ancient and venerable seat of 
learning surrendered unconditionally and accepted your 
terms. The Regents expressed their profound satisfac- 
tion in this result by reporting "that from the medical 
college thus united, and embracing the most eminent 
medical talent of the State in one splendid seminary, 
the most beneficial consequences may be anticipated." 
But the battle for sole supremacy was not yet over. A 
number of professors seceded, and procured authority 
from Rutgers College, New Jersey, to open in this city 
a medical school and confer upon its graduates the 
Rutgers degree. The Legislature was appealed to; 
State pride was invoked ; the question became one of 
the political issues of the time. The Physicians and 
Surgeons again triumphed, by the passage of a law 
declaring that degrees conferred upon the sacred soil of 
New York by the chartered colleges of foreign govern- 
ments should be void ; and this was one of the reasons 
put forth by New Jersey for the retaliatory legislation 
under which for half a century she exacted toll by way 
of state tax from our citizens crossing her borders. 
With the growth of the city this feeling gave way to a 
generous recognition of all worthy comers into this ex- 
haustless field of education and usefulness. 

The medical colleges of New York are no longer 
enemies, but friendly rivals, emulous in that strife for 
excellence by which each stimulates the others; and 
all combined form a splendid New York University of 
Medicine. Large endowments to any of them are of 
benefit to all, because none can be lifted to a position 
which the rest will not soon crowd, in this most happy 
contest to discover and impart those things which will 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPeW. 417 



prolong life, heal the sick, restore the crippled and in- 
jured, and alleviate suffering. The history of this Col- 
lege furnishes an illustration of the moral progress of 
the century. In the good old times, the doctrine that 
the end justifies the means received frequent and most 
authoritative approval. The State in 1808, and again 
in 1 8 14, resorted to that most insidious and demoraliz- 
ing form of gambling, the lottery, to put money into 
its treasury for the endowment and development of 
literary institutions and to promote higher education. 
From the first of these lotteries this College received 
$5000, and from the second $30,000, and without other 
public assistance has struggled and expanded until, 
after a lapse of seventy-two years, it becomes one of 
the strongest and best appointed schools in the world, 
through the medium of the splendid benefaction we 
this day commemorate. Upon these grounds, donated 
by William H. Vanderbilt, his gift erects, furnishes, 
and endows a building equal to all the requirements of 
the present and the needs of the future. Mr. W ilham 
D. Sloane builds the Maternity Hospital, and the gener- 
osity of his wife endows all the beds, making them free; 
while the four sons create the Clinic, which will be a 
vast dispensary, giving without charge to the poor, for 
all time, medicines and the best professional attend- 
ance, as a memorial to their father, more grateful to 
him if living and to his spirit now that he is dead than 
stately shaft or gorgeous mausoleum. 

The advances made by practical medicine in the past 
hundred years have kept pace with the wonderful de- 
velopment of this century in every department of hu- 
man thought and energy. The brilliant discoveries in 



41 8 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

chemistry have unfolded the mysterious processes of 
life and death. The microscope has found the germs 
which spread disease, carry infection, and propagate 
pestilence, and science is experimenting for their con- 
trol or extermination. Inv^ention and observation have 
stimulated each other, until the functions, the opera- 
tions, and the condition of every part of living men are 
seen by a diagnosis as clear and complete as the beaten 
pathway of truth, while pharmaceutical chemists have 
found new remedies and discovered the active princi- 
ple of those known before, so that the revelation and 
location of diseases have been followed by the finding 
of the drugs by which they may be stayed or cured. 
To meet the requirements of this tremendous and 
beneficent revolution medical education is no longer 
didactic, but clinical or experimental. Object teach- 
ing creates the modern physician. The lecturer of to- 
day is no longer a theorist, but a demonstrator of what 
the student can see. The laboratory, the hospital, and 
the dispensary are all necessary for his instruction. To 
extract the virtues from plants and minerals, to com- 
pound the elements which nature furnishes for cure, to 
walk the hospitals, to examine the endless forms of 
disease which flow through a dispensary, must be his 
daily life. To gather these in any institution has here- 
tofore required a capital beyond other resources than 
those of the Government, and hence the American 
physician has not felt fully equipped until he has 
received at London, Paris, or Vienna these practical 
lessons. Now a million of dollars, a private benefac- 
tion, renders possible the construction and equipment 
of a medical college superior to any ever known in this 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. 419 

country, and equal to the best in the world. With 
this endowment, and the impulse and inspiration which 
will follow it, New York will become the center of 
medical learning, education, and acquirement for the 
American Continent. 

Great fortunes involve grave duties from which there 
is no escape. The administration of a vast estate is a 
trust of far-reaching responsibilities. The law does not 
and cannot say how one shall use it, but the jury of the 
world is day by day taking testimony, and every right- 
minded man wants its favorable verdict. He must not 
squander, or waste, or hoard, and so long as it is ac- 
tively employed it does a public service. Strong and 
masterful men who create and hold together and man- 
age great enterprises which give employment and wages 
to thousands of people, and who keep their fortunes ac- 
tive in the conduct and development of business, are 
practical benefactors and philanthropists. They are of 
necessity the hardest workers in their system and often 
crushed by its weight. But they cannot stop at the 
point where their roads or mills, mines or factories, fur- 
nish the means of living to the healthy and able-bodied. 
They must contribute in liberal measure for the young, 
the helpless, the infirm, and the aged. In this they 
are laying up for themselves not only treasures in Heav- 
en, where moth and rust do not corrupt, nor thieves 
break through and steal, but the sweet incense of grati- 
tude and praise ever wafted to their memories. Said 
John Howard, the philanthropist, when dying of dis- 
ease contracted in the service of the unfortunate: "Let 
my monument be a sun-dial. I would be useful after 
my death." 



420 OR A TIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

William H. Vanderbilt led a life of work and care. 
He knew merit, and recognized, rewarded, and pro- 
moted it in numberless ways ; and he despised idlers, 
pretenders, and shams. He wanted his fellow-men to 
look through the wealth he was administering to the 
best of his ability and see him as he understood him- 
self, claiming no superiority to which he was not fairly 
entitled, trying to do his duty as a man and a citizen, 
living temperately, loving his friends, and willing to 
help in every good or public work. He was proud of 
New York, and besides his conspicuous gifts for the 
Obelisk and this college, he contributed in an unobtru- 
sive way vast sums for its religious, benevolent, art, 
and educational enterprises. This great city, with its 
marvelous growth, its cosmopolitan character, and its 
limitless future, is the most interesting of social and 
political problems. The world in miniature lives and 
works and illustrates all civilizations within its walls, 
and the time is not distant when the pulsations of its 
thought and commerce will move the world. From 
this foundation will rise an institution which will give 
New York the first rank in the most beneficent of the 
sciences. May it be also an example inspiring others 
to those deeds which are possible only to a few, but 
wisely bestowed may make our metropolis supreme in 
every department which educates, elevates, and enno- 
bles the race. 



CHA UNCE V M. DEPE W. 421 



XXXIV. 

address before the graduating class of the 
Columbia College Law School, at the Acad- 
EMY OF Music, New York, May 17, 1882. 



Gentlemen : 

This is the most interesting period of your lives. 
Behind is the preparation, before preparation and appli- 
cation of the stores you have and those you will acquire. 
The hour of graduation is always full of precious memo- 
ries and bright anticipations. The final review of the 
work done and its results, the last lingering words of 
admonition and advice, the separation from teachers 
and classmates, the sundering of ties never to be re- 
united, except in memory, the God-speed, the good-by, 
and you are alone amidst the contending forces, necessi- 
ties and ambitions of real life. Are you ready? 

The world is a generous adversary. Sooner or later 
it yields its prizes of independence and honor to those 
who merit them. The profession welcomes you with 
open arms. It places neither jealousies nor obstacles in 
the way, but with its cordial greeting gives encourage- 
ment and assistance. Trades-unions limit the number 
of their apprentices, and resist by every process the ac- 
quiring of their crafts ; but the temple of the law has its 
doors always open for those who would study and prac- 



42 2 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

tice its principles and teachings. You will never think 
you know so much as you do to-night, and your future 
will be dependent upon how far you appreciate the fact 
that you have only found the road and how to travel it. 

All about us are the wrecks of those for whom the 
clock struck twelve when they received their diplomas. 
The valedictorians of the college, the brilliant victors 
of the moot courts who fail to fulfill the promise of their 
youth, have neglected to continue the study and lost 
the enthusiasm to which they owed their triumphs on 
mimic battle-fields. Business men may have a lucky 
stroke of fortune ; preachers may buy or borrow ser- 
mons ; quacks may win riches by a patent medicine, 
but the lawyer can rely on no one but himself. He is 
like the knight in the ancient tournament, when the 
herald sounded the trumpet, and he rode down the 
lists— whether he splintered his enemy's lance, or was 
unhorsed himself, depended upon his own prowess and 
skill. Upon his advice men risk their character and 
fortunes. In the exigencies of the trial, he wins or 
loses by his own knowledge of his case, his ability to 
draw from a well-stocked armory the principles to meet 
unexpected issues, his readiness to seize and turn to 
instant advantage testimony which can help, or avert 
the force of that which can harm, by his trained ability 
to so discern and analyze amidst the mass of conflict- 
ing evidence the truth he seeks, and so present his 
cause to the court and jury that he brings them both 
to his own convictions. This can only be done by 
thorough preparation and laborious study continued all 
through life. 

The early years before a practice comes are full of 



CHA UNCE Y M. DEPE W. 423 

opportunity and danger. Some fall out from weariness 
and hopelessness. But there never yet was a man who 
deserved success, and doggedly and persistently pur- 
sued, who did not win it. "You will hear me yet," said 
Disraeli, as he sank into his seat amid the jeers and 
laughter of the House of Commons. It took years de- 
voted to study in every department before the threat 
was accomplished : but when recognition came, the man 
was so magnificently equipped that he at once stepped 
into, and ever afterward held, the leader's place. The 
despised Jew, rising to be the commander and oracle 
of the oldest and proudest of aristocracies, the Prime 
Minister of the most enlightened and powerful of em- 
pires, and a Peer of England, remains a bright beacon, 
lighting the way from exertion to triumph. But it is 
very difficult, with no immediate motive to offer in- 
centive, to study and read while waiting for clients. It 
requires discipline, and is discipline. It tests the ques- 
tion of fitness for the work of the profession. 

The benefactions of the wealthy have built and 
stored great libraries, and the opportunites for learning 
are all about us. The vast resources of history enlarg- 
ing the understanding by familiarity with the events 
and men of all times, the development of mankind, and 
the progress of civilization, give a comprehensive and 
permanent grasp of the principles learned in the schools 
by a knowledge of their origin, incidents, and accidents ; 
the broad and inviting fields of general literature equip 
with accuracy of language, fertility of illustration, and 
that indefinable force which all recognize as power. In 
some branch of general reading, the mind finally strikes 
a subject for which a special faculty exists, and enthusi- 



424 OR A TIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

asm and aptitude furnish the superiority which paves 
the way to vocation and success. As the law controls 
all the relations of life, regulates international disputes, 
and settles the rights and redresses the wrongs of all 
classes, conditions, and pursuits, so from the limitless 
range of inquiry and knowledge no weapon comes 
amiss. 

All great lawyers have been remarkable for the ex- 
tent and versatility of their acquirements. The works 
of Bacon and Brougham, Talfourd's delightful life of 
Charles Lamb, Chief-Justice Marshall's Washington, and 
Wirt's Patrick Henry, the contributions of Kent and 
Story, are marvelous monuments of improved oppor- 
tunities outside the law, strengthening and gracing its 
profession and practice. But how, except a man has 
extraordinary endowments, can all this be done? Your 
studies have made you familiar with the value of 
method, and yet odd hours are a lifetime. I said to 
Henry J. Raymond when he was writing the life of 
Lincoln: "How is it possible for you, editing a great 
daily newspaper, and immersed in public affairs, to find 
time for the research necessary to gather the mate- 
rials, and for the composition of this work?" He an- 
swered : "An hour conscientiously devoted every morn- 
ing before breakfast will soon fill a library." When I 
graduated at Yale, that wonderful old man, the elder 
Professor Silliman, then in his eightieth year, said; 
"Young gentlemen, as the result of my experience and 
observations, I have one piece of advice to give you : 
improve with reading the odd five minutes." It is as- 
tonishing how many of them there are. President 
Qarfield made it a rule, from which he never deviated, 



CHA UNCE V M. DEPE IV. 425 

to read ten lines of the classics, and three pages in 
some book of solid worth, every day, and he was the 
best informed and most accomplished public man of 
this generation. 

Some men fail because they have mistaken their call- 
ing. The patient research, unflagging zeal, and faculty 
to sift and discriminate, is not granted to every one, 
even if greatly gifted in other ways. For the best in- 
terests of the man and the world, the moment the dis- 
covery is made the profession should be abandoned. 
Putting square pegs in round holes ruins both the peg 
and the hole. Many are struggling with poverty and 
despair in the law, who would benefit society and en- 
rich themselves in the management of affairs. Two 
graduates of a law school have been to me within a few 
years, and each said: "I have thoroughly tested the 
question and find I have mistaken my vocation. My 
talent is for business alone." One was willing to begin 
as a brakeman and work up to be President, and the 
other preferred starting in the more attractive uniform 
of a conductor; but I honored their modesty and cour- 
age. Burke and Fielding and Cowper and Gray failed 
at the law, and earned undying fame in statesmanship 
or literature, while American journalism and letters 
owe their best contributions and purest fame to the 
early discovery and rectification of this mistake b)- 
Bryant, Longfellow, and Irving. The country is full of 
successful merchants, manufacturers, and railroad man- 
agers who have deserted the law, for which they were 
not fitted, and followed the bent of their genius, but 
who are nevertheless superior to their fellows in the 
same pursuits, because of their training in and faniili- 



42 6 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

arity with the grand fundamental principles of juris- 
prudence. 

Integrity of character and fidelity to opinions and 
duty are the first requisites of a good lawyer. The 
property of a client which comes into his possession can 
neither be borrowed nor loaned. It is a sacred trust, to 
be instantly and scrupulously accounted for. Because 
of laxity to this principle, without dishonesty in intent 
or result, I have seen many a brilliant and promising 
career stopped ; and many a conscientious plodder, by 
his fidelity and quick payments, win both honor and 
income, and become the custodian of large interests 
and estates. But in a broader sense must his integrity 
be conspicuous. It is safe to say he can never be bribed 
to betray his client, and that he will not misappropri- 
ate the funds in his hands. For though holding larger 
trusts than all other vocations combined, and Avithout 
security, the record of the profession in its fiduciary re- 
lations is of unexampled purity. But he must not be 
intimidated. A new tribunal judges and prejudges 
causes, before which he cannot plead, and that is trial 
by newspaper. The press controls the Government, 
and makes and unmakes public men ; and in the natu- 
ral tendency to magnify power, it influences the ad- 
ministration of justice. Having decided in advance 
the merits of a controversy, or the guilt of the accused, 
it assails with vigor the unpopular side. With the 
clouds thus thrown about the case, and which threaten 
to involve them, some lawyers decline, or, if retained, 
perform their duty with apology and timidity; but de- 
terred neither by misrepresentation nor unpopularity, 
the advocate, true to his oath and office in proportion 



CHA UNCE Y M. DEPE IV. 4 2 7 

as such difficulties surround him, will rise with mightier 
effort to vindicate by his courage and learning, in be- 
half of his client, both his honor and his profession. 

It is not alone by the brilliant triumphs of the advo- 
cate, but as adviser and friend, that the lawyer finds 
his sphere of largest usefulness. He discourages suits, 
and encourages settlements. He cools the passions 
and promotes the interests of his clients. He incul- 
cates justice by making it profitable. He mediates be- 
tween warring neighbors and secures the confidence 
and friendships of both. He discourages litigation, 
and, while promoting good fellowship, in the end in- 
creases his own retainers. He becomes an educator 
and benefactor in that broad sense which points out 
the right and enforces it. While dissenting utterl)- 
from Brougham's maxim, to stand by his client right or 
wrong, and even if it involves the ruin of his countr)-, 
he finds the law so unsettled by conflicting decisions, 
the facts so subject to the lights and shadows of ignor- 
ance, memory, and prejudice, that he rarely will have a 
case or client to which or whom it will not be his duty, 
with devotion and enthusiasm, to give his best efforts, 
leaving to the skill of his adversary, the learning and 
guidance of the judge, and the verdict of the jury, the 
vindication of the right. 

The vast enterprises of our times, the enormous 
profits of business and speculation, the rapid accumu- 
lation of gigantic fortunes, the intensity of industrial 
activities, the limitless expansion of production and 
commerce, the palaces of the wealthy rising on every 
side, and the adulation to and power of money, are the 
hope and despair of the profession. These elements 



428 onA TioNs And speeches of 

enlarge the limits of practice and narrow the possibility 
of competition, in the acquisition and fruits of riches. 
New issues to be settled, new relations to be adjusted, 
corporations and individuals to be advised, and large in- 
terests to be protected, increase the demand for trained, 
skilled, and able counselors far beyond the supply, 
while the distractions of society and luxury, and the 
temptations of other pursuits, enervate and deplete the 
ranks as fast as they are recruited. The sooner the 
young lawyer emancipates himself from this absorbing 
mania for fortune, the better for his usefulness and 
fame. The wonderful creations and profits of inven- 
tions, the ventures of the street and the exchange, the 
concentration of forces by which one man, with ma- 
chinery, reaps the harvest sown by thousands, are not 
his opportunity. In an age when steam and electricity 
reduplicate the powers and profits of business, his re- 
wards are derived only from his own exertions. While 
exacting full and fair returns for his skill and acquire- 
ments, his success is in knowledge and its power, in 
the superiority of intellectual over material forces, in 
his unquestioned influence in society and the State, 
and, with prudence and frugality, in an income which 
guarantees his independence, a competence for his old 
age, and an estate for his family. 

Nations have preserved their liberties, and patriots 
have won glorious victories, by the examples and inspi- 
ration of the past. Heroic sacrifices, grand achiev- 
ments, memorable battle-fields, the triumphs of states- 
men in the Cabinet, of orators in the Senate, of advo- 
cates in the forum, are the incentives to high endeavor 
and solid progress. We are "the heirs of all the ages 



en A UNCE y M. DEPE W. 429 

in the foremost files of time," and the accumulations 
of all the past are our inheritance. But no other pro- 
fession or pursuit has behind it exemplars and a history- 
like the law. Its teachers have been the foes of anar- 
chy, misrule, and tyranny, and its principles form the 
foundation of governments and the palladium of rights. 
Call the roll, and you summon God's chosen ministers 
of civilization and reform. It was not Pericles, but 
Solon and his statutes, who made possible Grecian 
power and progress ; it was not her legions, but her 
twelve tables, which made Rome the Mistress of the 
World ; it was not the defeat of the Moslem hordes, 
but the discovery of the Pandects, which preserved Eu- 
rope; it was not the Norman Conqueror, but the com- 
mon law, which evolved constitutional freedom out of 
chaos, revolution, and despotism. Bacon, Coke, Black- 
stone, Mansfield, Brougham, Erskine, Curran, Marshall, 
Hamilton, Jay, Livingston, Kent, Story, Webster, and 
hundreds of others, who by the law, and through the 
law, have done more for peoples and States than all the 
warriors of the world, are here to welcome you to their 

fellowship. 

In the sack of the Italian city of Amalfi, a copy of 
the Pandects was discovered, the study of the civil law 
sprang up all over Europe, and its administration passed 
from the hands of the ecclesiastics to its trained pro- 
fessors. In revenge, the Council of the Church held at 
Amalfi decreed that no lawyer could enter the king- 
dom of Heaven; but the lawyers have requited tliis 
anathema, by largely converting the nations from the 
Hell of Arms to the Heaven of Arbitration. Few of the 
Barons at Runnymede could read, and their sword-hilts 



430 ORA TIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

were their marks, but the lawyers improved upon their 
demands, by grafting upon the Great Charter those 
Saxon liberties for the individual embodied in that 
noble sentiment of the last will of King Alfred, that 
"it was just the English should forever remain as free 
as their own thoughts." It was the courts and not 
the commons which convinced the great and arbitrary 
Queen Elizabeth that there were limits to the royal 
prerogative, and warned Charles the First that taxation 
without representation might cost him his head. When 
submission and servility Avere threatening the integrity 
of English institutions, it was Chief-Justice Coke who 
steadied wavering patriotism with the grand sentiment 
"That power which is above law is not fit for the King 
to ask or the people to yield." King James the First- 
pedantic, pig-headed, and a tyrant— said : "I will dis- 
pense justice in person and reverse decrees at will." 
The judges firmly replied: "That, by the Constitution, 
can only be done by men learned in the law." "Then 
I will show what common-sense and common honesty 
can do," said the King, "by sitting with you." But on 
the third day he abandoned the judgment-seat cured, 
saying: "When one side speaks, the case is clear, but 
when the other closes, upon my soul I cannot tell 
which is right." English statesmen had guaranteed 
the protection of slavery in the West Indies, and the 
property and prosperity of thousands were dependent 
upon the pledge. The policy of the Government, the 
interests of trade, were all enlisted in its support ; but 
when Lord Mansfield said: "I know the promises of 
the Cabinet and the immense sums of money involved. 
Since, however, the question is before m&, fiat justitia 



CHA UNCE Y M. DEPE JV. 43 » 

ruaf cceliim; a slave cannot breathe the air of Eng- 
land" — then was human slavery doomed all over the 
world. It was as a law student that Cromwell learned 
those principles which caused him to pledge fortune 
and life to the motto, " that resistance to tyrants is 
obedience to God" ; and when the gay Cavalier went 
down before the resistless charge of his Ironsides, the 
freedom and development of the English-speaking 
world were assured. He established peace and liberty 
at home, and enlarged the power and possessions of his 
country abroad, and though Charles the Second, by 
violating the law, might squander this glorious inheri- 
tance, and disinter the remains of the great Protector, 
and hang them at Tyburn, his spirit crossed the seas 
in the Mayfioivcr and founded this Republic. 

There were one hundred and sixty crimes for which 
men and women were put to death in the time of 
Blackstone; Sir Matthew Hale hung for theft and 
burned for witchcraft ; but surpassing all the theories 
and labors of other philanthropists, the humanity and 
learning of Romilly, Mcintosh, and Brougham formu- 
lated into practical legislation those beneficent opin- 
ions, by which only for treason and murder shall a man 

forfeit his life. 

The American Revolution was not a sentiment, but 
a principle. It was not only an outburst of patriotism, 
but a struggle for the maintenance of law. We remem- 
ber now only the heroes of the battle-fields, but it was 
a lawyers' war. The long and terrible contest against 
civilized and savage foes in the effort to break the 
French power on this continent, which ended in the 
tragic and immortal fate of Wolfe and Montcalm at 



432 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

Quebec, inured and trained the people to arms, but the 
lawyers taught them their rights. It was the Hberties 
guaranteed EngHshmen by the Magna Charta, the 
Habeas Corpus, the Bill of Rights, and the common 
law, for which they fought. Glorious as are the lives, 
and precious the memories, of Washington, Greene, 
Putnam, and Wayne, they only maintained in the field 
the ideas which the Bar and the Bench, whose mem- 
bers are almost forgotten, embodied in addresses to 
the King and Parliament, and in the Declaration of 
Independence, and after the soldier had sheathed his 
sword in the National and State Constitutions. These 
documents are instinct with the doctrines for which for 
hundreds of years their fathers had died in battle, re- 
sisted the Crown from the Bench, and shed their blood 
upon the block. 

On the 9th of September, 1777, the first term of the 
Supreme Court of our State was held at Kingston. 
That Constitution which has served as a model for the 
United States and most of the States, had just been 
adopted. The seven nationalities represented on the 
committee of thirteen which framed it illustrated and 
foreshadowed the cosmopolitan and tolerant charac- 
ter of the people of New York. Burgoyne, with his 
army of veterans, victors of many European battle-fields, 
was marching with apparently resistless force from 
Canada, and Sir Henry Clinton was gathering soldiers 
and sloops of war to meet him at Albany. Patriot and 
Tory alike saw in the success of the movement the 
ruin of the American cause. It was the darkest hour 
of the struggle, and within a few weeks the village and 
court-house were burned by the enemy. Almost within 



CHA UNCE y M. bEPE l\^. 43 j 

the sound of the guns and war-whoops of the advanc- 
ing foe, with calm confidence and dignified assurance, 
that great jurist, Chief-justice Jay, charged the Grand 
Jury in the following words: "The infatuated sove- 
reign of Great Britain has, by destroying our former 
constitutions, enabled us to erect more eligible systems 
of government on their ruins, and by unwarrantable 
attempts to bind us in all cases whatever has reduced 
us to the happy necessity of being free from his con- 
trol in any. But let it be remembered that whatever 
mark of wisdom, experience, and patriotism there may 
be in your Constitution, it is yet like the beautiful sym- 
metry of our first parents, to be animated by the breath 
of life; from the people it must receive its spirit, and 
by them be quickened. Let virtue, honor, the love of 
liberty and science, be and remain in the soul of this 
Constitution, and it will become the source of great and 
extensive happiness to this and future generations." 

Ours is and always has been a government controlled 
by lawyers. In this De Tocqueville recognized its 
greatest claim to stability and expansion. The profes- 
sion has contributed seventeen of the twenty-one Pres- 
idents of the United States, and filled Cabinets and 
councils. It may be that their rule has been charac- 
terized by compromises and makeshifts, but it has suc- 
cessfully adapted an untried system to new and unex- 
pected emergencies. Its radicalism has always tended 
to the preservation of liberty, the maintenance of 
order, and the protection of property. Lawyers can 
be agitators without becoming communists, and re- 
formers without being demagogues. They have codi- 
fied the laws, brushed away the subtleties of practice, 



434 OUA TIONS AND SPEECHES Ofi 

abolished those fictions of law and equity which de- 
feated justice, and secured to women the administra- 
tion and disposition of their property; and yet liberties 
are always so enlarged as to preserve essential rights. 

Alexander Hamilton so settled the law of libel and 
the liberty of the press that his brief became part of 
the constitution of States and the law of England, and 
yet he devised the financial system which carried 
through the Revolutionary War. Salmon P. Chase 
died Chief-Justice of the United States, and yet it was 
his scheme of credit which sustained the nation in its 
great contest. The Geneva arbitrators and the Electo- 
ral Commission, with the lawyers' tribunal and weapons, 
peacefully settled questions of international contro- 
versy and governmental succession, which in all former 
times were decided by the wager of battle or bloody 
civil strife. 

The paramount question of the present hour is how 
the conditions of to-day can be adjusted to the accept- 
ed doctrines of the past. Steam and electricity and the 
unification of business and social relations have obliter- 
ated State lines. Centralization has been the fear of 
former generations; CjEsarism is the temporary mad- 
ness of the present. But, with a commercial people, 
the imaginary evils of the one and illusory perils of the 
other face the imperative necessities of law and busi- 
ness. That men and women should be married in one 
State and divorced in another, their children legitimate 
in one jurisdiction and illegitimate in another, is an 
offense against morals and a disgrace to our jurispru- 
dence. That railway, express, telegraph, and insurance 
companies are subject to varied, contradictory, antago- 



CHA UNCE Y M. DEPE VV. 435 

nistic and imperfect regulation and taxation in each 
commonwealth where they operate is the opportunity 
of the agitator, the despair of the manager, and the 
danger of the investor. The school of Jefferson did 
not foresee the effect upon our institutions of inven- 
tion and discovery. It is for the lawyer-statesman, 
whether in or out of office, to first eradicate time- 
honored prejudices, and then, by adjustment upon a 
broad, comprehensive, and national basis, to prove the 
elasticity and capabilities of constitutional freedom in 
a federative republic. 

Despotisms and democracies converge in the effort to 
control personal conditions and business principles by 
laws and regulations. With the one it leads to tyran- 
ny, with the other to the curse of over-legislation, and 
its constant modification and repeal, unsettling trade 
and values. If the Legislature met but once in four 
years, not a single interest would suffer, and security 
and stability would promote prosperity. Among an an- 
cient people every man who proposed a new law did so 
with a rope around his neck, signifying his willingness 
to be hung if it worked badly. If that rule prevailed 
with us, the multitude of public executions would en- 
force, as no other experience could, that wise maxim : 
"That Government is best which governs least." 

The duty of a lawyer to his profession and the State 
compels him to be a politician; but until success is 
assured he cannot be an office-holder. His training 
fits him to educate public sentiment and resist popular 
delusions, but he cannot enter public life without los- 
ing practice. Many a young man has gone to the Legis- 
lature expecting to find by the acquaintance and repu- 
tation it gives a speedy road to clients and income, 



436 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

and discovered that he has permanently lost both. It 
is said that there are three thousand college graduates 
in this city who cannot earn a living; it is because 
theory has outweighed practice, and educated sense 
has eradicated common-sense. Remember that every 
man knows more than you think he does, and the great 
mass mean to do right, and respect justice according 
to their lights. You have studied the architecture of 
the Temple of the Law, with its base covered with 
Egyptian hieroglyphs and Hebrew texts, its Roman 
columns and Grecian capitals, its massive handiwork 
of Norman and Saxon ; but it has often been leveled 
to the ground. Though full covenant deeds have been 
found in mummy cases; though Solon enacted statutes 
upon wills, debtors, creditors, and bankruptcy, parent 
and child, and pensions to soldiers ; though the Rho- 
dians had a maritime code centuries before Christ, and 
Athens consuls and courts of admiralty; though Cic- 
ero borrowed money upon mortgage, and Rome recog- 
nized the principle of compensation for private prop- 
erty taken for public use, — force and corruption swept 
away every vestige of law and shred of right, and the 
world retrograded to barbarism and despotism. For 
dark ages following this brilliant civilization, upon the 
grave of every principle of justice and equity, might 
was the only right. The teachings of the Nazarene 
have brought nations and races into harmonious rela- 
tions, established the worth and independence of the 
individual, and given perpetuity to law and justice. 
You are the custodians, exponents, and defenders of 
the law thus regenerated and disenthralled, and your 
future is dependent upon your own industry, integrity, 
and nrianhood. 



CHA UNCE V M. DEPE IV. 43 ^ 



XXXV. 

ADDRESS AT THE EIGHTEENTH ANNIVERSARY OF 
THE Working-Women's Protective Union, 
Chickering Hall, New York, February 6, 
1882. 



Ladies and Gentlemen: 

The report which has been read to-night by the 
Treasurer of this society, and the address to which you 
have listened from my friend Judge Gedney tell the 
whole story. 

We are called together on one of the most practical 
of missions and of objects. It appeals, it is true, to 
our sympathies and our compassions, but it appeals 
more nearly and closely to our sense of right and jus- 
tice. We are here for the purpose of assisting an 
organization whose object is to equalize the strong with 
the weak, the poor with the rich, so far as their simple 
rights are concerned. Its object is that there shall be 
no oppression, under forms of law or outside of it ; but 
that, in our own community at least, the letter as well 
as the spirit of the law shall be practically enforced — 
that all men and all women are equal before it. 

We are proud of this great city of ours, and yet it is 
great and powerful and rich, not alone on account of 
its great business enterprises ; of its commerce ; of its 



43 8 OJ?A TIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

financial ability ; of its great warehouses and its great 
capitalists and financiers, — but because it provides for 
the stranger; looks out for the weak and the oppressed ; 
succors the distressed, and fairly administers the law. 
It may be all very well in great capitals of the Old 
World for these things to be neglected, because, under 
a strong government, there is a great standing army, 
and on the borders of the city the fort and the trained 
soldiery are ready, at any moment, to tear down the 
barricade, to suppress the riot, and to put down the 
insurrection. But here are we in the third city in the 
world in population, and with nearly two millions of 
inhabitants, three-fourths of whom have no property, 
and depend upon their daily exertions for that which 
shall support and sustain them. Life is secure, and 
property is secure. Why is it that, in a community 
like ours, where there is no standing army, no forts, no 
soldiery, no war ships, we can have our great ware- 
houses filled with the richest fabrics from all the world ; 
that our banks and our trust companies can have their 
vaults crowded with the wealth of the continent ; that 
our streets and avenues can be filled with the palaces of 
the wealthy, within which they can enjoy their luxury 
as safe in their lives, in their families, and in their prop- 
erties, as if they were surrounded by a standing army? 
Why is it that we have peace, order, and security here 
without any of these appliances? 

It is because, without the aid of government, and 
without the assistance of an army, the wisdom of the 
people erects the hospitals which look after the sick 
and the injured and those who are unable to look after 
themselves ; erects the asylums and the homes that 



CHA UNCE Y M. DEPE W 439 



take care of the distressed and the poor; erects the 
schools that look after the street Arab, and educate 
him who has no home, no father, no mother — aid him 
to obtain employment and an honorable living — a wis- 
dom which looks after the rights and the justice of the 
poor, and sees that they have them, under all circum- 
stances, as is exemplified by this society. 

Now it took thousands of years and oceans of blood 
to establish that great fundamental principle of Anglo- 
Saxon liberty— that a poor man's home is his castle. 
Be it ever so humble, though made of logs and thatched 
with straw, without that man's consent the king cannot 
enter it. But while it took so much to establish this 
great principle— that the smallest item of property, 
that the littlest corner of land is safe, and secure, and 
protected, so that the strongest and the most powerful 
combination cannot wrest it from the possessor, there 
was also built up and established a great array of tech- 
nicalities and of instrumentalities and of machinery, 
which only lawyers understand and courts can adminis- 
ter, and which are so expensive that the very machinery 
reared and constructed to protect property is often 
used for the purpose of oppression. The simple rea- 
son for this is, that while it is all but impossible to take 
property from him who has it and to whom it be- 
longs, it is almost impossible for the poor to collect 
their own from the strong who hold it in their grasp. 

Now it is at the dividing line where justice is done 
in the name of law, and justice is violated under the 
forms of law, that an association like this, organized for 
the purpose of leveling up and equalizing, comes in 
and sets at work, for the poor and the oppressed, the 



44° OR A TIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

machinery of the law. Then the strong and the weak 
are equaHzed, and the rich and the poor stand before 
the court upon an equal foundation. 

Years ago — and you all remember it, it was one of 
the scandals of this city — great establishments, employ- 
ing hundreds and hundreds of working-girls, grew rich 
by defrauding them. It is one of the most painful ele- 
ments of our human nature that, when avarice gets 
possession of a man, and the desire to acquire takes 
entire control of his soul, that moment humanity and 
compassion and a recognition of the rights of others are 
completely and fully worked out, as if they were never 
put in him. 

These people were in the habit of discharging every 
Saturday night a certain percentage of their employees, 
and not paying them, knowing that with the great sur- 
plus of labor their places could be supplied the next 
week. The money thus withheld passed to the swell- 
ing tide of profits. 

There was another class who were in the habit of 
doing just that which Judge Gedney described here to- 
night — sending shirts or clothes, or mantillas or cloaks, 
whatever it might be, — and when at the end of the 
week the poor woman, who had been working night 
and day, locked her children in the attic room and sped 
along with hungry form to the place where she was to 
receive her pittance, and put her work upon the coun- 
ter, she was informed that the work did not suit. The 
price of her week's work may have been two dollars or 
three dollars, but what did that mean to her? Why, it 
meant that on Monday morning she could not pay the 
rent. It meant that the Sunday must be passed with- 



CHA UNCE V M. DEPE W. 441 

out food for these children or medicine for the sick. 
It meant that she must face the alternative of the street 
or the river. 

Now, just at this moment, in again steps the agency 
of this Society. The poor woman cannot set the 
machinery of the law in motion — the money which she 
is to collect is too small to tempt a lawyer if he got 
the whole of it, and the court would not recognize or 
look at her; but she goes to the counter of this society, 
and instantly a lawyer is set in motion and the machi- 
nery of justice is put upon its wheels, and a messenger, 
armed with justice and vengeance, goes into that 
man's shop and takes him by the throat and says: 
"That woman's pay, or go to court"; and if he don't 
pay, he goes there, and when he leaves, it is either to 
jail to stay there until he pays, or else it is with the 
admonition of the indignant judge ringing in his ears. 
He leaves with a hole burned through his pocket by 
the money which has been extracted and triple costs 
added at the same time; with a vacant place in his 
bosom, where a conscience which he has plucked out 
once was, but with something rattling around in its 
place which very much resembles remorse. 

But it is not alone men who do these acts of fraud 
and injustice. It is one of those anomalies that I have 
never been able to account for, that women are more 
cruel to each other than men are to them ; antl among 
the worst oppressors, as I learn from the records of 
this Society, of the poor women of New York, are the 
women employers who have these great fashionable 
establishments where dresses, cloaks, and hats are made. 
There is many a ball at Delmonico's to wbich the lady 



442 ORA TIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

comes in a dress which is the jealousy and agony of all 
her sisters, and the despair of the Jenkins who tries to 
describe it,— and yet this dress is sown with tears and 
fraud ; there is many a beautiful creature, tripping by to 
church, whose "love of a bonnet" environs a shapely 
head and beautiful face, that completes all that the 
poet said — 

When she tied her bonnet under her chin, 
She tied a young man's heart within ; 

and yet while that young lady has duly paid for her 
bonnet, the person of whom she bought stole it — stole 
it out of the scanty earnings of poor women whom 
she did not pay. But this society is no respecter of 
women under such circumstances, and they must "walk 
up to the captain's office and settle," or suffer the con- 
sequences. 

Now there is another, and the hardest case of all. 
There is many a fine lady moving in the best society 
and riding in her carriage, whose extravagances are be- 
yond her income or her allowance, and the easiest per- 
son to cheat or to put off is the seamstress. She can 
ring the door-bell, and the magnificent footman can say 
no ; or if she is admitted, the answer is, "Next week"— 
"Next month" — "Later." I remember hearing a story 
recently of a bereaved gentleman who had lost his inti- 
mate friend, and he went to the florist and ordered a 
pillar of flowers, and he wanted put in it, in red flowers, 
the letters S. Y. L. The florist, most curious, said, "My 
friend, will you please tell me what S. Y. L. stand for?" 
"Oh, certainly, my dear sir— See You Later." I had no 
reference to my friend Mr. Tilden in telling that story. 
But this Society, armed with the processes of the law, 



CHA UNCE Y M. DEPE W. 443 

brushes aside that footman, and enters that door, and 
says to my fine lady : "See and settle now." 

There is another mission which this Society performs, 
and that is in procuring employment. There are one 
hundred thousand working-women in this city, and 
they get, on an average, only about two or three dol- 
lars a week, and they have no other means of support. 
For two thousand years Christianity has been endeav- 
oring to ameliorate and elevate the condition of women. 
Amongst savages they are beasts of burden ; among 
barbarians and Mohammedans they are toys and slaves; 
but among us, notwithstanding that my friends the 
Women's Suffrage Association have not got all they 
wanted, women have every right that man has and 
every privilege, except the right to vote, — and the right 
to vote would^not protect her in just the things that 
we are looking after to-night. But with all these 
privileges have come corresponding responsibilities. 
No longer a toy, no longer a plaything, the equality 
of 'the woman is recognized in her power to hold prop- 
erty and transact business. She is treated as a busi- 
ness person, and must assume its responsibilities— must 
earn her living. 

Now, I know of nothing more helpless than the con- 
dition of these one hundred thousand working-women. 
There are one hundred thousand working-men in this 
city, but they get three times the pay for the same 
labor, and this is the disgrace of our civilization— that 
discriminations exist where women and men perform 
the same or equivalent labor. But to the man the ave- 
nues are already opened, and with the boundless enter- 
prise of our people new avenues are opening. To him are 



444 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

given the elements of ambition and hope. He knows 
that with energy, with thrift, and with honesty there is 
certainty of advancement, and the possibility of a grand 
success. Our avenues and our broad streets are full of 
the magnificent palaces of men who have been porters, 
who have been laborers, who have been mechanics, 
have been apprentices, have been sailors, and to-day 
are great capitalists, swinging great enterprises and 
living in affluence and luxury. Every working-man 
knows that what has been can be, and that the oppor- 
tunities are as good to-day as they ever were. 

But there are no palaces, no great houses, no cot- 
tages even, which tell the working-woman that one 
of her class and opportunity has ever risen above want 
to competency, much less to affluence. For her there 
is only the possibility, and no more, of an unfurnished 
and scant lodging, and the scant clothing of the poor 
for her to-day, and the same to-morrow, and no bet- 
ter than it was yesterday. There is nothing to me 
that so strongly illustrates the angelic nature and 
hopeful faith that we ascribe to women as that these 
one hundred thousand women, under these circum- 
stances, denied hope in this world, cheerfully work on, 
ask no charity, perform all their duties, preserve their 
purity, and simply expect a reward when the grand day 
comes. 

The eloquent figures of to-night, showing that forty- 
six thousand women have received aid from this 
Society, and that two hundred and forty-five thousand 
applications have been made and answered, speak more 
eloquently than anything that can be said on this plat- 
form, or in cold type, of the mission, of the uses of 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. 44^ 

this Society. Another of its objects is to widen the 
field of woman's work. There was a time when 
everybody said that the only thing that a woman 
could do was to sew or to teach, and that all others 
were not honorable ; but we have gradually grown to 
that condition of affairs where we recognize the fact 
that any work is honorable which is honest. It may 
not be over-clean, so far as physical conditions are con- 
cerned, or over-neat. It may not be elegant or grace- 
ful. It may not meet the approval of Oscar Wilde, but 
yet so long as it meets a want and is useful, it is hon- 
orable for both men and women to engage in it. 

Now the great difificulty of our people is their edu- 
cation. In our community no education meets the 
objects for which it is put on foot, unless the man and 
the woman are taught to earn a living. We are sub- 
ject constantly to commercial reverses. The panic 
comes along and the great house goes down, and the 
bank topples over, and the rich man of to-day is the 
poor man of to-morrow. But unfortunately most of 
our teaching is of such a character that neither for the 
poor, nor the moderately poor, nor the rich — neither 
for the clerk, nor the mechanic, nor the merchant, is 
the daughter taught anything by which she can earn a 
living, if the hour of necessity comes. I was brought 
up in the country. There they do things differently, and 
look out more practically for the real ends of life. There 
may not be so much sentiment and poetry— there may 
not be so many lilies or sunflowers in button-holes — 
there are plenty of them in the fields, — but there is a 
real practical understanding of the needs of life. Kver>'- 
body appreciates the advice which Micawber. when he 



■*^< (Si^jsirxiX'^ .'ijK^ ^^-^^cffs^ ■OS 

wjts in jiS for ^d^it, gave ito D^xid C<!>pperfte*dl : "X^p- 

pcrfidld, isny ^j\ mcomate <M>e pcand, expenses lw«My 

easjsemtses; imne-teea si»alilii>§s^ sixpence — j^es«k hji|^M- 

JBat ^- -. - :... .-.;.• ,- ooiii»es aloa-jg, ami the great 

' ' -OS ia raaa «3r th>e bank pas^ses into the 

o. receaver — in llie ex^MKies c\f our fa<ihi<«»- 

^. .. ....<. society life in Xe\r York, e\N2T\ '^ '- has lj\^ 

r-- "- t*-:? ^vill extent <3f his income, ai;.. ...v.e is not 

: f ;rr next daj/ — nou\ tfe<MJ, the daughters of 
lead of being able toa&a:^, in their help- 
lessness becorae burdens which accelerate the ruin. 
. - -dtchen is to thean as unknowni a world as central 
Africa, and thev do not laiow anything more about 
the sewing-room th^n they know about integral calcu- 
has. But it is possible to have an education which shall 
practically teach girls how, in case of necessity, they 
may do something to help theanselxx^s and others, at 
the same time that they ha\-e just as many of the 'olo- 
gies," and just as many of the languages, and just as 
much of the veneer conx-Tersation that is put on in our 
schools, \iithout any detriment to it whatex'er. I know 
two honorable exceptions : a man worth thrx>e millions 
of dollars told me that his daughters, during the past 
year, had earned in a few months one hundred dollars 
per month simply in decorating china for one of our 
great stores. A gentleman whose grandfather was a 
rich man, and who is himself the inheritor of the prop- 
erty, said: "Even.' one of my daughters h.is leanied a 
trade, and can earn her own living if the great need 
comes." 



CU4fJ0Cfr./ jif 



4^ 



4«7 



M- 



Ifjt^t^r^ ■ . ^ 



m,^: 






^lo.^ 






iJik'',/^'^ 'U..V--; v'.' '"-^■f.',.',-'" 



■^/•p-' 



44^ ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

He lowered the boat and got her and brought her 
alongside, and she tried out eighty barrels of oil, and 
the captain said; "Mate, you have done well; I will 
speak of you to the owners of the ship and you will 
be complimented, and maybe you will be promoted." 
"But, " said the mate, "I don't want none of your 
mentions, and I don't want none of your compliments, 
and I don't want none of your promotions — all I want 
is common civility, and that of the commonest kind," 

Now this Society gathered here to-night asks your 
contributions to secure for the working-women of New 
York, not charity, not compassion, not sympathy, but 
common justice, and that of the commonest kind. 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. 449 



XXXVI. 

ADDRESS BEFORE THE ANNUAL CONVENTION OF 
THE Psi Upsilon Societies of the Various 
Colleges in the United States, held at 
Syracuse, May to, 1882. 



Gentlemen: 

It is a pleasure and privilege to meet with you here 
to-day. I come not as a teacher, but as an elder 
brother, to greet the active workers in Psi Upsilon. I 
leave for a moment the cares of an arduous profession, 
the duties of an active business, the engrossing de- 
mands of an all-surrounding materialism to renew these 
associations of early manhood. A life has little in it 
worth living, which cannot frequently return to the 
memories, the aspirations, the hopes of its beginning. 
By occasional draughts from these fountains daily 
duties cease to be the routine of the treadmill, work- 
becomes a recreation, the hardening processes produced 
by contact and contest with selfishness and viciousness 
are arrested, and our confidence in human nature, its 
purity, its development, its possibilities, is sustaineil 
and enlarged. It is proper that you upon the threshold 
and I in mid-career should reason away our hour for 
discussion in reviewing the necessity, the uses, and the 
duties of a liberal education. 



450 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

The guild of higher education is the most liberal of 
all orders. Unlike other unions, there is no limit to 
its membership or restriction upon the number of those 
who shall be trained for admission. It is a pure democ- 
racy, where honors are only worn by those who win 
them, and cannot be transmitted or inherited. It has 
no secrets; but while it explores the whole field of 
knowledge, its discoveries are for the benefit of all 
mankind. Its object is to lay broad and deep the foun- 
dations, by such mastery of language, science, and lit- 
erature as best prepares the way for the professions, 
the arts, the humanities, and the liberal pursuits of life, 
trains and develops the intellect, and adds to the 
strength and manliness of character. It is the duty 
and destiny of the human race to improve its condi- 
tion. Through all the trials and tribulations of the 
ages it has been true to this destiny. Its history is one 
of progress and development. For centuries, however, 
its story is the biography of isolated and eminent indi- 
viduals. Conquerors and philosophers stand out in start- 
ling prominence from the groveling and ignorant masses 
about them. There was for long periods no healthy 
or permanent growth ; only as education has been free 
alike to all has society as a whole improved. Students 
echo the statement that there is nothing new under the 
sun, but all the arts we have were once known and 
then lost. That is because the secret of them was con- 
fined to the few and kept from the masses. Education 
has been the great leveler and elevator. The mighty 
revolutions produced by the invention of gunpowder, 
printing, steam, and electrical appliances, the enlarge- 
ment of liberty and law, the triumphs and beneficent 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. 451 

results of science and mechanism, have followed and 
accelerated the diffusion of liberal culture. 

We live in a time when the average intelligence is 
higher the purity and perfection of society greater, 
and the essential liberties larger than ever before. As 
the demand for trained workers, and the necessity for 
thorough preparation, increase, so do the difficulties in 
the way of solid learning. Speed is the virtue and vice 
of our generation. We demand that morning-glories 
and century-plants shall submit to the same conditions 
and flower with equal frequency. The inventive genius 
of mankind has provided labor-saving machines for 
every necessity and luxury. By it industries have been 
stimulated, and the results of labor reduplicated beyond 
the power of language to state. One man takes the 
place of a hundred workers; the labor which formerly 
required a year is now performed in a day, and time 
and space are annihilated. State-building in earlier 
times was the process of centuries ; now it is the easy 
outgrowth of a decade. The iron rail is laid through 
the wilderness, and the next summer the industrious 
immigrant gathers the harvest which feeds the world. 
This vast and incalculable multiplication of power, this 
grasp and utilization of all the forces of nature, pro- 
jects arid successfully executes enterprises whose magni- 
tude surpasses the dreams of the Arabian romancer. 
The Orient has listlessly listened for ages to the story- 
teller's tales of the wonders worked by mighty genii, 
and the fairy phantasies created by Shakespeare have 
been the delight of the world, but they arc both sur- 
passed by the daily commonplaces of our time. Indi- 
viduals accumulate fortunes whose income exceeds the 



452 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

revenue of kingdoms, and every State in the Union can 
boast of a millionnaire whose wealth reduces to com- 
parative poverty the traditional treasures of Croesus 
and Crassus. There is fever in the blood and fire in 
the brain. The people are possessed with this fierce 
energy of industrial and material progress. Cortez, 
Pizarro, and De Soto sought not more recklessly El 
Dorado and the Fountain of Youth, than does our 
population the sudden accumulation of riches. To the 
luxuries which wealth could always command are now 
added the control of great enterprises, the concentra- 
tion of power, the social distinction and adulation which 
formerly belonged to lofty lineage or great achieve- 
ments in arms, the arts, or literature. The contagion of 
the conflict, the fruits of its victories, affect almost alike 
the ignoble, the ingenuous, and the ambitious; and the 
few for its possession, the many for its uses and oppor- 
tunities, plunge with absorbing anxiety into this strug- 
gle for money. The Church, the College, the Forum, 
the Senate, all feel the pressure and the effects of this 
consuming passion. 

Hence the danger and difificulties which now threaten 
liberal culture. Amid the din and clash, the rush and 
roar of industrial activities and speculative excitements, 
the young man finds it very hard to secure the time, 
repose, and encouragement necessary to lay that firm 
and solid foundation without which a liberal education 
and broad healthful development of the intellectual fac- 
ulties are alike impossible. No greed is so unsatisfac- 
tory, no economy so wasteful, as that which begrudges 
or saves the years necessary for thorough preparation. 
It is mainly from the ranks of the common people that 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. 453 

the army of liberal education is recruited. From farm 
and workshop come the men who will dare and suffer in 
the service of learning; their goal is knowledge, their 
destiny to wield its power. The successful and opulent 
desire that their sons shall become also opulent and 
successful at the earliest possible moment. Precept 
and example impel only to those studies which can 
easiest be made practically available. They besiege 
the doors of the university, the law school, the medi- 
cal college, clamoring for a short road to business. 
The colleges recognize the demand, and enlarging the 
boundaries and loosening the discipline of the curri- 
culum, permit the substitution of elective studies to 
those who have neither the ability nor experience to 
elect, and grant diplomas for bread-and-butter equip- 
ments. Some not satisfied with this are rushed in 
a year through business, or commercial, or other spe- 
cialty colleges, and boast that while their compan- 
ions are digging amid the bones and dust of the 
buried past, they, having purchased a ready-made suit 
of mental clothing, are achieving independence and 
fortune. Father and son, anxious for immediate re- 
sults, say these precious years when a practice might 
be secured, or a business established, cannot be sparctl 
for dead languages, science, philosophy, and literature, 
which are not essential in the practical work of the 
profession, or merchandise, or manufactures. It tin >■ 
select engineering for their vocation, that .school is 
best which puts them soonest in the field. If they are 
inclined to literary pursuits, their ambition is not to 
produce work which will contribute to learning, adorn 
the library, and win solid fame, but by popular and 



454 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

ephemeral processes to sell the millions of trash, and 
win the fortunes which shall compensate for forgetful- 
ness and oblivion. If they aspire to the pulpit, they 
spurn the weary years and tireless labor by which alone 
the sources of faith and truth are explored and mastered, 
and their studies are to so gild the Gospel and culti- 
vate the social graces as to secure the wealthiest church 
and largest salary. If law or medicine is to be their 
avocation, they will learn only so much as will most 
speedily bring fees and retainers, and leave the battle 
for the right in society and government to reformers 
and politicians, and the ministering to the poor and 
suffering and the defense of the weak and the wronged 
to philanthropists and fools. This teaching and prac- 
tice have filled the land with narrow-minded, partly in- 
formed, and bigoted specialists, useless to themselves 
or the world outside their avocation, and not great 
within it, and with shallow idiots who, fresh from the 
tailor's block and hair-dresser's chair, gabble about art 
and beauty and aesthetics and "culchaw." 

But while Arkwright with his spinning-jenny en- 
abled one set of fingers to do the work of thousands, 
Fulton with his steamboat created modern commerce, 
Howe with his sewing-machine indefinitely multiplied 
the results of labor, Whitney with his cotton-gin revo- 
lutionized a continent, and the Corliss engine concen- 
trated a century in every cycle of the sun, there is no 
royal road to learning; application, work, continuity, 
and enthusiasm are its conditions. It is true, the dead 
languages are not in daily use in the pulpit, the forum, 
or business ; that science, philosophy, history, belles let- 
tres do not of themselves cure souls or patients, win 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. 455 

causes or coin money. It is true that modern lan- 
guages with their exhaustless stores of priceless learn- 
ing claim equal regard and study. But those better and 
more safely navigate the stream who know it from 
source to delta, and whose vision is not bounded by 
the territory where they ply their trade. The lan- 
guages not only give grace and accuracy to the expres- 
sion of thoughts, open the treasure-houses of knowl- 
edge, furnish the weapons to overcome error and 
prejudice, but through them Wilkinson wrote the 
lives of Pharaohs who had been forgotten before his- 
tory was born, and Layard and Rawlinson have dug 
from under the Tower of Babel and deciphered the 
library of Nebuchadnezzar, and by its testimony over- 
thrown the speculations of infidelity, corroborated 
the Bible, and buttressed the faith of Christendom. 
Science has made plain the secrets of animate and in- 
animate nature, and philosophy has mapped the mind. 
Companionship and familiarity with the worthies, the 
thoughts, the achievements, and the discoveries of 
other times so influence character, so enlarge the intel- 
lect, so increase the ability to grasp and sift and find 
the truth, that one so privileged is promoted in his 
vocation from a soldier to a knight; his work is not 
labor, but love; and while he adorns and honors his 
specialty, his manhood adds to the value and influence 
of his citizenship. We are the heirs of all the accumu- 
lations of the past, but we cannot prove our title ami 
secure our inheritance by the decree of the surrogate or 
the award of the courts of probate; it comes only 
through the honest acquisition of a liberal education. 
While such a man comes later to his life work, he 



4S6 OJiA TIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

makes not only a better preacher, lawyer, doctor, edi- 
tor, or man of affairs, but outside his profession he pos- 
sesses resources for pleasure to himself and influence 
over others which add immeasurably to the enjoyment 
of living. 

Two races of men planted thousands of years ago the 
germs of all the civilization and culture we possess, the 
Egyptians and the Greeks. With the Egyptians learn- 
ing was a mystery. It was subdivided into branches, 
and these were the exclusive hereditary property of 
families. They shared neither with each other nor the 
world the things they knew. Only those initiated 
through mystic rites could enter the order, and they 
only to one degree. The result was, that their art and 
learning were of the earth, earthy, and have perished. 
Their pyramids, obelisks, columns, sphinxes, testify to 
the grandeur and materialism of their culture, but of 
their sages, philosophers, poets, not even a name sur- 
vives. The education of Greece, on the other hand, 
was free and open to all. Her schools and gymnasiums 
had doors on every side. All that she knew or discov- 
ered was the common property of the world. Emula- 
tion stimulated inquiry, and freedom gave birth to 
genius. Phidias and Praxiteles, Demosthenes, Socrates, 
Plato and Aristotle, Pericles and Leonidas, arc house- 
hold names to-day. They instruct in the studio, teach 
in the college, legislate in the senate, and fight in the 
field. Her art, eloquence, philosophy, literature, and 
patriotism have been the inspiration, admiration, and 
despair of succeeding centuries. We have adopted this 
free system, and upon its preservation, development, 
and use depend the growth of society and the pros- 



CHA UNCE Y M. DEPE It'. 457 

perity of the nation. The people have built and en- 
dowed universities and libraries. The generous bene- 
factions to Harvard and Yale, Cornell, Johns Hopkins, 
and the Vanderbilt, the Astor and Lenox libraries, 
with scores of kindred efforts, attest the value placed 
by those who have and those who have not enjoyed its 
benefits upon a liberal education. As the encourage- 
ment of the State and the contributions of the liberal 
have thus furnished us our opportunity, so do we owe, 
in return, a larger recompense than our personal suc- 
cess. It is to be public-spirited, generous in our efforts 
to aid our fellows in the never-ending strife between 
truth and error, to do the best we can, whatever we 
undertake to do at all, and as preachers be more than 
doctrinaires, as teachers more than machines, as law- 
yers more than advocates, as editors more than parti- 
sans, illustrating anew each day that knowledge is 
power and American men of culture understand its 
proper use. Thus the men whom scholarship has blest 
are true to the high duties of their order, and bless the 
state and mankind. Far be it from me to disparage 
diligence in business, or discourage the accumulation of 
independence and fortune. That man would be un- 
true to his mission, his family, and his happiness, wlm 
failed to do thoroughly his work, and prudently pro- 
vide for those dependent upon him and for his own old 
age; but he can neither, like a miser, hoard for his sel- 
fish gratification the learning he has acquired, nor neg- 
lect the larger responsibilities imposed in a free govern- 
ment upon educated men. 

The great motors of modern progress iuive come 
from the universities. They have not been accidents. 



45 S ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

but the developments of learning. They have been 
evolved from the patient processes of the schools, and 
the wealth, comforts, luxuries of mankind are due to 
the teachings of the colleges. In the laboratory of the 
University of Glasgow the application of steam to the arts 
and mechanics was discovered, by which the world has 
accomplished more in the last century than during the 
whole period since the birth of Christ. By thoughtful 
and intelligent experiments at Princeton electricity was 
utilized, and under man's control the lightning belts 
the globe, furnishes an illuminating medium which rivals 
the sun, and suggests the possibility of a new force 
moving the industries, incalculably accelerating produc- 
tiveness and power. The study of astronomy and its 
revelations have created the science of navigation, and 
made upon the trackless ocean beaten highways for 
commerce. From science and mathematics have come 
the principles underlying and suggesting all the marvel- 
ous inventions which are the pride and glory of our 
age; while by chemistry the elements have been wrung 
from Nature to enable the physician to cure diseases, 
mitigate suffering, and prolong the span of human life. 
The universities in all ages have been the nurseries 
and citadels of liberty. When Church and State con- 
spired together to crush the last vestiges of civil and relig- 
ious freedom ; when independence died upon the scaf- 
fold and the block; thought was incarcerated in dun- 
geons, and conscience was burned at the stake and tor- 
tured on the rack, and Abelard, brilliant and beautiful, 
groping in the dark for truth, fled to the wilderness, 
fifteen thousand students gathered about him, and for 
their own government organized a pure democracy. 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. 459 

At Oxford, Paris, Berlin, Prague— wherever a univer- 
sity existed, — their student repubhcs, built upon Abel- 
ard's model, trained and graduated the Apostles of Lib- 
erty. It was the student who precipitated the revolu- 
tion of 1848, which altered the map and liberalized 
every government in Europe. With a million of sol- 
diers and a million of policemen to uphold despotism 
and suppress liberty in Russia, the spirit of her colleges 
keeps the Czar a prisoner in his own palace. From 
their professors' chairs at Wurtemberg and Prague, 
Huss and Luther started the Reformation, to which we 
chiefly owe our modern civilization. Knox went from 
the University at Aberdeen to thunder in the presence 
of Mary Queen of Scots those terrible truths which 
made Scotland the home and center of culture anJ 
religious inquiry, and that sweet and mighty Oxford pro- 
fessor, John Wyckliffe, in giving to the people the Eng- 
lish Bible, started a movement which ended in the 
Declaration of our Independence, and the formation of 
the American Republic. 

The knights of the order to which these men be- 
longed cannot be idle. The repose of learning is 
delightful ; quiet companionship and enjoyment of fa- 
vorite authors and the solitude of congenial study full 
of refined and quiet pleasure; but such is not their 
mission. Religious revulsions, social revolutions, popu- 
lar elections, the making of laws, the direction of those 
forces in free communities and states which are con- 
stantly working good or evil, demand attention and 
direction. Man is ever struggling for real or imaginary 
emancipation. His enemy' exists, or he creates it. It 
may be against genuine injustice that he rebels, or, 



4<5o ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

ignorant and misled, against those conditions and re- 
straints absolutely essential to safety and order. In 
his effort to throw off the tyranny of forms he would 
uproot all faiths. In his protest against inequalities of 
fortune and position he wages an indiscriminate war- 
fare against capital, careless or forgetful of the fact that 
powerful combinations and vast resources are necessary 
in conducting the great enterprises which in our time 
develop national wealth and promote individual pros- 
perity and happiness. Educated intelligence keeps 
radicalism wdthin proper limits, and forces it to con- 
serve the highest purposes, by harnessing it to the car 
of progress. The masses have been so educated, and 
society as a whole so elevated, that the destinies of 
mankind can no longer be changed or controlled by 
Cromwells or Napoleons. Atheism assails the Church, 
communism order, socialism society, financial heresies 
credit, State Rights the Republic, and they can only be 
met and overcome by the resistless logic of superior 
knowledge. The Oneida Community reforms, Mor- 
monism topples toward its downfall, Greenbackism is 
dissipated by the resistless force of educated public 
opinion and enlightened conscience. The captains, the 
teachers, the leaders in every community who produce 
these results are and must be the men who have re- 
ceived a liberal education, and are inspired by public 
spirit. The stability and beneficence of our Government 
is due to the fact that neither standing armies, nor state 
churches, nor illiberal laws, nor hereditary orders of 
nobility, repress and restrain ; but the scholars of the 
land, engaged in its practical pursuits, upon the ros- 
trum, from the pulpit, through the press, in the discus- 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. 461 

sions at the corners, controvert or hold in or direct 
dangerous principles or elements. 

The liberally educated young men in our country 
should be politicians; but it is almost impossible for 
them to be office-holders. Office, unless they have 
first secured at least a moderate competence, endan- 
gers their independence, retards their success, and may 
spoil their career. Public life has been in all free states 
the highest and noblest of ambitions. To guide the 
Republic, command listening senates, and promote the 
national welfare, fill the full measure of duty and fame. 
But the same causes which threaten solid learning 
have changed the representative opportunities. The 
energy of business, its absorption of all classes, its de- 
mand for uninterrupted time and attention, and the 
increase of the cost of living, have nowhere producctl 
such marked effects as upon our statesmanship. The 
legitimate expenses of an election almost equal the 
salary of the representative, and the exacting duties 
of the place prevent his successful management of 
either a professional or mercantile vocation. The rap- 
idly increasing labor of properly administering the Gov- 
ernment of this vast and growing Republic adds daily 
to the difficulties of the situation. Men of afTairs, in- 
stead of applauding the public spirit of one of their 
number who enters the public service, regard him 
with distrust and withdraw their confidence and 
credit. Hence the halls of Congress are gradually 
filling up with wealthy men and professional place- 
men. The glorious school in which preceding gener- 
ations were trained for grand careers is almost dis- 
banded. Convictions yield to expediency, and the 



462 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

ability to guide and the courage to resist are leaving 
their accustomed seats. By combinations and cun- 
ning, mediocrity occupies positions it cannot fill, and 
the "machine" runs for the suppression of dangerous 
ability and the division of all the dividends of honor 
and power among its directors. The leaders are depend- 
ent upon followers who have no livelihood but office, 
and who desert the setting, and worship the rising sun, 
with a facility which surpasses the Middle Age courtier, 
who cried, "The King is dead ; long live the King." 
The necessity for manipulation for re-election — of re- 
election for a vocation — gives no opportunity to master 
those great questions upon whose wise solution depends 
the destiny of the commonwealth, and the representa- 
tive, devoured by a consuming anxiety about his for- 
tunes, and having failed to study the needs and princi- 
ples of government, is blown about by every shifting 
current of the popular breath. When he falls, because 
he has builded upon the sand, if he has passed the 
period when adaptation is possible to new pursuits, he 
closes his career as a doorkeeper, a claim agent, or a 
department clerk. There is not at this hour in public 
life a single recognized and undisputed leader of a 
great party, or the progenitor of accepted ideas, l^he 
Congressional Record is a morass of crudity and words, 
whose boundless area and fathomless depths none have 
the courage to explore. The Washingtons, Adamses 
and Jays of the first period, the Hamiltons, Jeffersons 
and Madisons of the second, the Websters, Clays and 
Calhouns of the third, and the Sewards, Sumners, 
Chases and Lincolns of the fourth, have no successors 
of equal power and influence. The debates of to-day 



CffA UNCE V M. DEPE W. 463 

are unread, but the utterances of these statesmen were 
the oracles of milHons. Has the talent which made 
these men eminent died out? Oh, no. It is practicing 
law, editing newpapers, managing manufactories, mines, 
and commerce, building railroads, and directing trans- 
portation. 

If then those who fill the leaders' place cannot lead, 
so much greater the responsibility and duty which rests 
upon the liberally educated to so watch and ward, so 
understand and teach, so discuss and act, that an intel- 
ligent and vigilant public opinion shall hold in its 
grasp and direct for its purposes Presidents, Cabinets, 
and Congresses. Never fear but that, if they are true 
to their mission, whenever one of those mighty crises 
comes which threaten the stability of our institutions 
and demand the services of the loftiest patriotism and 
genius, from the ranks will spring other Websters 
and Clays to the council, other Sewards, Chases, and 
Stantons to the Cabinet, other Lincolns to the Presi- 
dency, and other Grants, Shermans, Sheridans, and 
Thomases to the field. 

The privilege of freely criticising is granted only to 
those who can greatly boast. We need have no regrets 
for the past, or anxiety for its return. No time is so 
good as the present, no period, no country, so rich in 
liberty and opportunity as ours. Races have lived and 
died; nations have flourished and perished; heroes, 
martyrs, and sages have left priceless legacies, and wc 
are their heirs and the beneficiaries of all the experi- 
ence, the examples, and the accumulations of the past. 
The most radical, we are also the most conservative, 
of states. We can canonize William Lloyd Garrison as 



4<54 ORA TIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

a reformer, and dismiss Dennis Kearney as a dema- 
gogue. Extremes find unexpected safety-valves in 
a freedom of speech which amounts to license, and 
seeking walls to tear down, beat against the empty air, 
while Conservatism, in our written constitutions, our 
adoption of the common law, our reverence for the 
fathers, our independent judiciary, finds rights pro- 
tected and wrongs redressed. Genius, which was mis- 
understood, or ignored, or persecuted, or put to death, 
in its own time, receives the recognition and applause 
of ours. Plato was sold into slavery, and Socrates com- 
pelled to drink the hemlock. Cicero pleaded to bought 
juries; Sidney and Russell, though heroes with us, 
ivere martyrs in their own age. Galileo was forced to 
deny his philosophy, and Bacon's contemporaries said 
his works were like the "Peace of God, which passeth 
all understanding." The wits and worthies of the time 
of Queen Elizabeth and Queen Anne are more thor- 
oughly appreciated and largely read by this generation 
than by all which have preceded. While even the ear- 
lier part of this century doubted and opposed the 
railroad, tried to prevent the introduction of gas, and 
sneered at and fought the telegraph, this decade wel- 
comes and encourages all invention and discovery, art 
and letters. Twenty years ago Emerson, the trans- 
cendentalist, and Darwin, the evolutionist, were alike 
the objects of almost universal sneers and scoffs; and 
now the world, assigning to each the highest place in 
his sphere, stands by reverently with bared head while 
the one is buried beneath the Concord elms, and the 
other is laid away in Westminster Abbey, among Eng- 
land's mighty dead. 



CHA UNCE Y M. DEPE // '. 465 

A recent tragedy, which shocked and stilled the 
world, brought before his countrymen a glorious exam- 
ple of the scholar in public life. While performing 
with rigid exactness all the duties of his calling, he 
never neglected the claims the community had upon 
his citizenship and culture. He found time every day 
for his alloted lines from the classics, and pages in 
some book of solid worth. When he enlisted in the 
army, he mastered the curriculum of West Point in 
three months, and won Kentucky by crossing a swollen 
river, when the engineers could suggest no remed\-, 
upon a bridge constructed from recollections of Cassar's 
Commentaries. He learned the French language to 
get readier access to the great works upon finance, 
when his Congressional duties demanded a solution of 
that vital question ; and reasoning from original princi- 
ples, founded in his college life, impressed upon the 
Supreme Court of the United States a new bulwark of 
liberty. The broad foundation he laid at Williams, his 
loyalty ever after to learning, and the uses and duties 
of knowledge, developed the backwoods boy into the 
learned scholar, the good teacher, the successful sol- 
dier, the accomplished lawyer, the eloquent orator, the 
equipped statesman, and the lamented President James 
A. Garfield. 



4^6 oraTioxWS and speeches 6P 



XXXVII. 

ADDRESS AT THE OPENING OF THE NEW BUILDING 
OF THE New York Produce Exchange, May 6, 
1884. 



Mr. President and Gentlemen: 

The opening of this Exchange marks an important 
era in our national development. The wildest dreamer 
of the preceding generation would not have hazarded 
the prediction that in thirty years the merchants of 
this city engaged only in the handling of domestic food 
products would have required and possessed the re- 
sources to build a palace of commerce costing three 
millions of dollars. The modest rented room which 
met all your wants in i860, expanding into this superb 
structure in 1884, illustrates the agricultural and com- 
mercial progress of this country in the last quarter of a 
century. The startling splendor of the facts reduces 
to ordinary experiences the wild creations of "The Ara- 
bian Nights." This Exchange is an example of how the 
things most dreaded by our fathers are welcomed and 
utilized for the most beneficent purposes in our day. 
The one nightmare disturbing the dreams of the past 
was the dread of centralization. From some relic of 
those times still lingering among us we hear an occa- 
sional echo of the old universal cry. But out of the 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. 467 

Civil War the Republic came, with more power in the 
General Government than the Federalists demanded, 
and upon the grave of State Rights has grown an 
intense and absorbing Nationalism. This tendency is 
seen in older countries in the unity of Germany and 
Italy, and of peoples of a common race everywhere. 
The same principle prevails in trade. But instead of 
the evils anticipated, it has made possible the wonderful 
results which we here in part celebrate. It has covered 
the land with the network of railways which carries 
the settler to the virgin fields and distributes, the world 
over, the products of his industry. It has built the 
steamship and the telegraph. It proves the immortal- 
ity of man that he always controls the mighty forces 
which he conjures. He is never their victim, but always 
their master, and his Frankensteins are the useful ser- 
vants of his will. Within the memory of most of you 
it was possible for a single man to grasp all the agen- 
cies necessary for business success, and figlit his way 
alone with limited resources. But now that steam ap- 
plied to transportation by land and sea comparatively 
eliminates time and distance between the places of sup- 
ply and demand; now that the conditions of all the 
markets of the world are known in every market 
during all the hours of 'Change; now that the mer- 
chant must know the prospects of coming crops, the 
supply on hand at home and abroad, the price of 
money in America and Europe, the fluctuating freight 
rates in times of railway or steamship troubles; except 
for exchanges like this, all business would be con- 
centrated in the hands of a few men with enormous 
capital. But just here, combinations lik< v-ur«; avert 



468 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

the dangers and receive the benefits of these tremendous 
conditions of modern trade. Your association reaches 
out and gathers the information ; it places in the 
hands of all its members alike the factors of the busi- 
ness problem ; and then it is not so much the magni- 
tude of the capital as the skill in solution which deter- 
mines success — then every one, with an equal chance, 
according to his means and ability wins a living, a 
competence, or a fortune. 

Thus commerce becomes in our civilization the 
strongest force in the conservation of law, order, and 
property. There is nothing new under the sun, and 
our freshly imported socialists and communists in their 
wild ravings present the passionate appeals of the op- 
pressed and injured of earlier times, without knowing 
their history or possessing their justification. Most of 
the great landed estates in Europe were acquired by the 
ancestors of the present owners by conquests marked 
with all the horrors of arson, slaughter, and slavery. 
The natural revulsion of the Saxon farmer tilling his 
own acres for a Norman master whose iron collar of ser- 
vitude he wore riveted about his neck, was to the des- 
truction of everything which represented or strength- 
ened the dominant class. But with the absolute 
equality of all men before the law ; with the prohibi- 
tion of primogeniture and entail and the tying-up of 
vast estates for generations; with all the avenues of 
honor and thrift open and unobstructed, the reasons for 
the revolt have passed away. Four hundred years ago 
one-half the population of Scotland was begging from 
door to door, because there was no diversity of labor 
and therefore no employment. The great industrial 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPhW. 469 

trouble to-day in Ireland is the policy which has kept 
her purely agricultural and deprived her of manufac- 
tures and trade. Commerce enforces the law and the 
lesson that the acccumulations which make possible 
great enterprises, prosperous manufactories, the openinj; 
and working of mines, and the cheap and rapid liand- 
ling of all the products of the earth, the forge, and the 
loom, are necessary, if great populations are to be main- 
tained, made happy and enriched by employment and 
opportunity. The rich man who has no sympathy with 
the poor insults his own beginnings or the hard-work- 
ing father or grandfather to whom he owes his wealth. 
The poor man who would level all property rights stands 
in the way of the welfare and rise of his children. The 
fortunes and misfortunes of business where the State 
grants equal conditions to all, prove that, while no man 
will willingly give his work and brains that others may 
live at his expense, if what he honestly wins is his own 
then the universal incentive for fortune, for competence, 
for a homestead, for provision for the family ami the 
helpless and beloved, produces the marvelous develop- 
ment of material resources, and the frequent and re- 
markable example of individual prosperity, which are 
the pride and wonder of our time. 

Commerce demands for its operations, first of all. 
security. No pirates by sea or robbers by land may 
prey upon it. Neutral states and warring territories 
must respect, and insurance protect it from losses by 
the elements. And so we have that confidence which 
begets credit, the handmaid of enterprise, courage, and 
brains. With credit men of capacity outstrip the slow 
and cautious movements of capital, and in the util./.a. 



47° ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

tion and encouragement of invention and discovery, 
agriculture, manufacture, and the trades of every kind 
receive new development and impetus. The other 
requisites are freedom of labor and adequate and rea- 
sonable transportation. These principles in all ages 
have made commercial centers the nurseries and asylums 
of liberty and civilization. The Phoenician traders, the 
forefathers of the modern merchants, built the splen- 
did cities of Tyre, Sidon, and Carthage, which were the 
home of the arts and the barriers to despotism. The 
supremacy of Greek letters and liberty were due to the 
commercial instinct of the race, while the warlike 
Roman, conquering and destroying one after another all 
the ancient marts of trade, reduced the people to bar- 
barism and poverty, till in his despair the barbarian 
.sprang at the throat of his oppressor and strangled him. 
No picture of human misery equals that presented in 
the Middle Ages, where the robber barons plundered 
and outraged all without their castle walls. The 
world, sunk in misery, was sinking into savagery, but 
the merchants in the Hanseatic League and the cities 
of Holland preserved freedom, saved learning, rescued 
civilization, and kept religion alive. When the cities 
of the League, after five hundred years of successful 
struggle, surrendered their autonomy to Bismarck's 
idea and the German Empire, it was the last and most 
fitting concession to the triumph of law and the secur- 
ity of commercial rights in modern government. It 
was a commercial company which conquered India and 
added three hundred millions of subjects to the British 
Crown. It is commercial enterprise which supports 
Stanley on the Congo, and adventurous explorers all 



CHA UNCE V M. DEPE W. 4 7 1 

over Africa, and which will bring the Dark Continent 
and its people within the lines of civilization and Chris- 
tianity. 

Having secured all the elements necessary to its suc- 
cessful prosecution, trade is no longer monopolized by 
great companies like the East India, the South Sea, 
and the Hudson Bay. The individual, emancipated 
and free, asserts himself in business as in the State. 
Competition stimulates and limits his enterprises. Hy 
far the greatest and most important branch of modern 
commerce is feeding the toiling millions for whom 
our complex civilization has afforded other occupations 
than tilling the soil. The limitless acres on our prairies 
and in our valleys, brought by rail within easy reach of 
the seaboard, and by steamer in close connection with 
all the markets of Europe, furnish to us the opportu- 
nity of supplying food for the world and draining its 
wealth into our industries and treasuries. Have we 
the statesmanship, the patriotism, the business ability 
to profit by the situation? A few figures will illustrate 
by what rapid steps we have reached this power for 
enormous production. In 1850 there were one million 
five hundred thousand farms in the United States; in 
1880 there were four millions. In 1S50 we raised five 
hundred and ninety-two million bushels of corn, and in 
1880 we raised one billion and eight hundred million. 
In 1850 we raised one hundred million bushels of 
wheat, and in 1880 we raised four hundred and sixty 
million. In 1873 the balance of trade turned in our 
favor by the exports of these jKoducts, and continued 
in increasing volume year by year until at its height, in 
1881, the cereals of the country had repaired all the 



472 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

losses of our greatest panic. American competition 
drove the British farmer into bankruptcy, and the Con- 
tinental one to despair. Two thousand men own the 
soil of Great Britain, and the tenant farmer pays from 
five to ten dollars per acre a year rent. Onerous taxes 
to support standing armies and vast military establish- 
ments bear with crushing severity upon the German, 
French, and Russian agriculturist. One-tenth of the 
best labor of the land is idle in the army. The average 
assessment to support these great organizations is four 
dollars per head of the population, while in our great 
West the annual rent of an English farm buys a home- 
stead in fee, taxes are nominal, and transportation the 
cheapest in the world. Unless England breaks up her 
vast landed estates into small holdings, unless the 
nations of the Continent disband their armies, the mar- 
kets of Europe must be ours, and they can only be lost 
to us by our own folly. The exhaustlessly fertile land 
along the Nile and in the other granaries of the ancient 
world possess all their pristine productiveness — bad 
government has for ages cursed them with desolation, — 
but with England, powerful everywhere in the East, 
and looking for cheap food for her operatives, that by 
cheaper labor she may be able to undersell with her 
manufactures all competitors, these Oriental fields 
might blossom and bear as of old. We can conjure this 
right Spirit, and already he shows dangerous signs of 
life. In the time of Pliny, Egypt ruined the Italian 
farmer, and in the time of Pompey, Italy was given over 
to vast grazing farms and her agriculturists driven to 
cities or the legions, because Egyptian wheat could be 
bought in Rome for seven cents a bushel, which cost 



CHA UNCE Y M. DEPE W. 4 7 3 

the Italians a dollar a bushel to raise. Two years ago 
the speculators of Chicago, acting upon a theory which 
might have been well enough if food products could 
have been purchased by Europe only from America, by 
gigantic corners and other artificial processes drove the 
price of wheat up to fabulous figures. The effect was 
magical, and roused to efforts to share in this wonder- 
ful wealth of annual harvest peoples who had slumbered 
for centuries. The Russian railways penetrated the 
rich mold along the Black Sea, and elevators were built 
at Odessa. English capitalists furnished seeds and im- 
plements to the patient Hindoo, and the British Govern- 
ment ran railroads through the valleys of India. The 
Greek Islands awoke to a new life, and the banks of the 
Nile once more responded to intelligent culture. And 
now we are exporting gold instead of grain, and accu- 
mulating debts instead of dollars. In the wheat pit of 
Chicago in a single year was buried more of the future 
prosperity of the Republic than the sum of all the traf- 
fic which flows through the great city would mount up 
to in a decade. 

It is in this field of activity that the New York 
Produce Exchange can fulfill a most patriotic and pow- 
erful mission. It handles seventy-five per cent, of t he- 
exports from the country, and its legitimate transac- 
tions reach the enormous money value of ten millions 
of dollars a day. It is organized to deal in the food 
products of the Republic, not to gamble with them. 
In noble and memorable words its constitution recites 
that "the purposes of our institution shall be to incul- 
cate just and equitable principles in trade." Under this 
banner the interchanging surplus of harvest and manu- 



474 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

factures of temperate and tropical climes and diverse 
industries will bless and enrich the land. You are a 
great commercial congress, and can represent the opin- 
ions and interests of the lonely homesteader following 
the furrow across the prairies of Dakota, the giant 
farmer plowing by steam-power the fields of Minne- 
sota, the toiling millions dependent upon active capital 
and prosperous trade in the great cities and manufactur- 
ing towns. To one and all of them the honest handling 
of the harvest and the control of the markets of Europe 
is a question of life or death. Greed, which penal 
laws cannot reach or patriotism curb, can be defeated 
by education and intelligence. Let some of the mil- 
lions now squandered by the Government in the vain 
effort to turn turtle ponds into inland seas, and trout 
streams into navigable rivers, to perpetuate some local 
statesman, be wisely spent in organizing a bureau of in- 
formation so vast and yet so accurate that misrepresen- 
tations as to the daily prospects of the crops at home 
and abroad, as to the supply on hand in domestic and 
foreign markets, as to the prices in the world's marts, 
and the conditions of transportation, will be impossible, 
and make all their factors at all times accessible to every 
citizen. Then audacity cannot play upon credulity, and 
fiction upon ignorance, and a ring of speculators regulate 
at will the ebb and flow of our national life. Let the 
morning and evening trains, as they rush across the 
farms and along the highways, carry the signals of the 
Weather Bureau, so that the advantages of the property 
may be utilized by every husbandman. Concentrate 
upon the national Capital your wisdom and experience 
to avert the evils of debased currency, to be followed by 



CHA UNCE Y M. DEPE IV. 4 - - 

ruined credits. A Chinese wall of silver dollars of fluc- 
tuating and depreciated value artificiallv built abmu 
our business must result in untold cal'amities, and a 
constant and alarming drain of gold. The necessity of 
their position has intensified the natural hostility nf 
our foreign competitors. Every art invented and'jK-r- 
fected in centuries of fiercest rivalry among commercial 
peoples is used to defame our food products. Our 
reputation for sharpness and smartness is enormously en- 
hanced for the purpose of supporting wholesale charges 
that disease or adulterations form with us common and 
applauded forms of fraud. The German Chancellor 
and the British Parliament have given their great 
authority to assist in these assaults upon our credit 
and good name. This question has become one of the 
gravest national and international importance. The 
truth is now so rapidly and universally diffused that 
neither the falsehoods of traders, nor the orders of 
autocrats, can long sustain misrepresentations if ever)- 
basis for them be taken away. The New York Produce 
Exchange has heretofore done great service in this 
good work, but with the new strength and prestige 
which are to-day so conspicuously presented acting 
both as a representative and custodian of our honor 
and prosperity, formulating rules, conducting investig.i- 
tions and enforcing justice with the utuK^st vigor and 
impartiality, and instantly and fearlessl)- vindicating 
those who are unjustly attacketl, anil exposing tht)sc 
who are guilty, it must eradicate every justification for 
slander, establish beyond the possibility of dispute the 
purity of the products we export, the integrity of the 
men who raise or manufacture, and of the American 



476 ORATIONS And speeches of 

merchants who trade in them. The statue of Thomas 
H. Benton, at St. Louis, with outstretched arm point- 
ing to the West, holds a scroll bearing the legend, 
"Behold the East." Never since the three Wise Men 
followed the star to the manger of Bethlehem has 
there been such resurrection power in the eastward cur- 
rent as now. It flows with ever-increasing volume 
through the Golden Gates of the Pacific, gathering in 
strength and beneficence as it rolls across the conti- 
nent. This magnificent home of commerce marks its 
course and growth, and this grand city, the metropolis 
of the continent, is its creation. The forces which have 
made can unmake, and the outcome is almost abso- 
lutely in your own hands. Patriotic, cosmopolitan, hos- 
pitable, broad, healthy, and vigorous, as the merchants 
of New York have ever been, they will continue to be 
in a nobler and larger sense under this dome, and the 
architects of the past will be the successful builders of 
the future. 



CHA UNCE Y M. DEPE IK 4 ^ 7 



T 



XXXVIII. 

HE Politics of the Future.— Address at the 
Complimentary Banquet to Mr. S. S. Pack- 
ard, given by the Alumni Association of 
Packard's Business College, at Dei Mnvico's, 
June 2, 1883. 



Ladies and Gentlemen : 

Your President pays me the high compliment of hav- 
ing never failed in an effort of this kind, but if that be 
true, nevertheless to every man comes his first time. 
and I feel that to-night will bring me to this sad period, 
because of my youth and inexperience. 

We have come to-night to pay a desenx-d tribute 
and to award a well-won honor to our guest. He has 
distincfuished himself in the best and most useful of 
all callings— that of the teacher. As such, he has fitted 
thousands of young men for the battle of life, and in 
token of their gratitude they tender him this tcstimo- 
nial, and ask us to witness and to help. They render 
him that most gratifying of all earthly tributes when 
they say: "We have been successful, and we owe it to 
your teachings." He has thus built up for himself a 
constituency which will remain more true and faithful 
to him than the following of any politician- a constitu- 
ency who bear him always in remembrance, and who 
feel that they can only repay tiic debt thry owe him 



47^ ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

by living up to the teachings and the examples which 
he has given them. 

What are to be the politics of the future? I think 
Mrs. Croly has indicated them in a measure. They are 
certainly not to be the politics of the past. I know of 
no one who could treat this toast so well as my friend 
opposite, Major Bundy. He has done more thinking 
and able writing on the subject than any editor in 
America; and yet he is not discouraged. It is the 
finest illustration of the axiom that "hope springs 
eternal in the human breast." He long ago discovered 
that he was pursuing an evanescent something, which 
"never is," but always is "to be" ; but he has also found 
it and contributed to make it a theme of ever-present 
discussion. In the past we have followed leaders and 
organizations rather than ideals and ideas. "Vote for 
the Devil incarnate if regularly nominated," has been 
the shibboleth for many years, and has held in its grasp 
even those who knew that his Satanic Majesty con- 
trolled the nominations. I doubt if it is possible to 
have any old-fashioned, nervous, and passionate poli- 
tics where there is a high order of education. There 
is a sort of feudal fidelity in the politics to which we 
have been accustomed which requires the kind of men 
described by Mrs. Croly. They must be faithful fol- 
lowers, caring more for men than measures, and while 
understanding Httle of party principles, rendering un- 
questioning devotion to the party flag. 

But the broader and better education of to-day has 
broken the sway of leaders, and emancipated the 
thought of the masses. It has produced such an 
amount of independent action based upon individual 



CHAUNCEY M. DEFEW. 479 

judgment as to destroy all the old methods of popular 
success. In the immediate future, pending this transi- 
tion period, parties will play a subordinate part, and 
leaders none at all. Though it is a higher ideal, I do 
not look for very beneficial results speedily following. 
Its first and unfortunate effect has been to create a 
widespread indifference to both practical and theoreti- 
cal politics. In a republic nothing can be more danger- 
ous than general apathy and neglect of public duties. 
The second result has been the fostering of a feeling 
of almost contempt for public life. The position of 
Representative formerly gave of itself recognition and 
distinction; it was an honor, and its influence and 
power compensated for the loss of profitable vocations 
and income ; but now it adds nothing to social dignity, 
and is a bar to business success. A professional man 
who accepts official position loses practice, and a busi- 
ness man loses credit. The very existence of free 
government depends upon its law-makers and adminis- 
trators being the representatives of the best elements 
among its people : they must be foremost in intelli- 
gence and integrity; but if public life is tabooed by 
the commercial, business, and industrial classes, whose 
prosperity is wholly dependent upon good government, 
then the politics of the future are full of uncertainly 
and danger. We need not look for this condition and 
promise. This country has progressed so rapidly, its 
development has been so wonderful, the material suc- 
cess of hundreds of thousands has been so great, that 
artificial conditions have formed about us. Income 
and its expenditure have become essential to that sort 
of social recognition which all men want and all women 



48o OI?A TIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

will have. This formerly followed the honors won in 
public life, but that is no longer the case, and with the 
vastly increasing expenses of living, the means to 
meet them cannot be honestly earned in politics. The 
salaries attached to official positions have not kept 
pace with the growth of the country, nor is it possible 
or proper for them to do so. And to give the time 
required to enact laws for fifty millions of people 
leaves a man no opportunity for practice or business. 
Thus we run the risk of having but two kinds of pub- 
lic men : those who are very rich, and those who, hav- 
ing no other occupations, must and will live by and 
out of their places. 

I was in Washington at the close of the last session 
of Congress, and one of the most distinguished mem- 
bers of that body said to me: 'T tell you, Depew, 
this is one of the saddest days of my life. At least a 
half-dozen of our very best and most able members, 
most of whom have been here for over ten years, have 
been carried out by the tidal-waves in the last election. 
They are experienced, accomplished, and conscien- 
tious, and the country can ill afford to lose their ser- 
vices, but they have been left at home. They have 
lost their business and its connections, and are too 
old to begin anew. They cannot stand at the bottom 
at their time of life, with the burdens which are on 
them, and they must either find a position in some of 
the departments or starve." 

The only remedy for this evil is to give more per- 
manency and security to public life. The civil service, 
with most beneficial results, is doing its work in the 
administrative branches of the Government. In our 



CHA UNCE V />/. DEPE W. 48 1 

representation we must silence the howl of the claims 
of locality. Then when a man has shown exceptional 
ability, patriotism, and usefulness, if he fails in one dis- 
trict, his party can return him from another: thus all 
his time and talents will be given to the Republic; 
thus will the honor become so great, that its possessor, 
without fortune or other means than his salary, will 
occupy the foremost place among his fellows; thus 
will we escape the danger of having a public service 
filled by those who are simply fourth-rate attorneys 
or mutton-headed millionaires. And I trust also that in 
the politics of the future some voice will be given to 
our wives, our sisters, and our daughters. An active 
and intelligent interest on their part in the vital ques- 
tions of the day will give to the politics of the future 
that purity and higher tone and earnestness by which 
the loftiest patriotism and the most intense materialism 
can supplement and support each other, giving to the 
country the best of governments and the largest pros- 
perity. 



4^2 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 



XXXIX. 

address on the tenth anniversary of the 
Organization of the Railroad Branch of 
THE Young Men's Christian Association of 
New York, January 4, 1887. 



Ladies and Gentlemen: 

I am glad to see that your numbers have increased 
so much since I was here one year ago ; whether it is 
because you have all joined since then, or you were 
not all here at that time, I don't know, but I take it 
that it is because of the additions to the Association. 

Our chairman was too modest to-night when he 
spoke of the ten years since this organization was 
founded, because without him it would not have been 
created, and except for his constant aid and advice 
it would never have reached the position which it has 
attained to-day ; and when I look forward to the next 
ten years, to the usefulness, the enormous growth, 
and the influences which are to spring from the 
building upon the corner yonder, also built by Mr. 
Vanderbilt, I believe that the effect of the work in that 
building on the intellectual, moral, and physical health 
of the men belonging to the various railroads that cen- 
ter at the Grand Central Station will extend to every rail- 
road in the United States, and that the managers will 
see to it that an institution so useful, an influence so 



CHA UNCE V M. DEPE W. 4 S3 

grand, shall be established on their own Hncs, and 
buildings of the same character erected out of their own 
funds at all the principal centers where their men gather. 

I was struck with one remark made this afternoon 
in a conversation with Mr. Morse, the Secretary of the 
International Committee, which looks after this branch. 
He said that since this room was opened the influence 
had been far-reaching, embracing not only the men 
employed here, but the management of other roads 
themselves; and alluded to the establishment of 
branches elsewhere as a result of the success which h.is 
been attained here. It impressed upon my mind the 
thought that has been there a long time, that there is 
but one railroad in the United States — the New York 
Central — and that all the others are branches. 

The last time I met Morse \vas in Germany last 
summer, and like all good Americans I wanted to go 
to Strasburg and see the wonderful clock in the fa- 
mous cathedral. You know^ about that clock; it strikes, 
and the Apostles come out. They belong to the 
mechanism which is wound up to go qcx) \-cars, and 
not to stop till the last moment of time. Whether it 
will fulfill its inventor's claims I do not expect to hve 
to see. Well, I went on the railroad from Hadcn- 
Baden with my family to see that clock. \\ r hati 
fifteen m.inutes leeway when we arrived, and it took 
seven minutes to get from the depot to tlie cathedral. 
When half-way to Strasburg I discovered that we were 
twelve minutes late, and I offered the German con- 
ductor a month's salary if he would make up the time. 
He told me the next day when 1 went back that he 
did not get the idea through his head till he came 



484 OJiA TIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

down the next morning. He would never do for a con- 
ductor on the New York Central. You know how it is 
with German railways — they are run by the Govern- 
ment. There are some people who want the railways 
run by the Government here. Well, a railway run by 
the Government goes this way : an express train makes 
twenty miles an hour, and stops every twenty minutes 
for refreshments; and a way train runs twelve miles an 
hour, and stops from thirty to sixty minutes at each 
station. When we reached the depot we had just five 
minutes left. I had telegraphed for a carriage, and I 
tumbled my wife and her mother, and "little buster" 
and myself into it, and the courier got on the box and 
told the coachman to go ahead, and then he waved his 
umbrella and shouted to all the people to get out of 
the way. The first dog that saw us coming gave a 
yelp, and that started all the dogs in Strasburg barking 
and running after us in full chorus; people jumped to 
one side and shook their heads, and we got to the door 
of the cathedral just as the crowd was coming out — it 
was all over. When I got inside, the first man I saw 
was Morse ; he was smiling at me like a brightly shining 
tin-pan on a farmer's fence, because I got left. He 
said : "Depew, when I want to get anywhere in time, I 
go over night." He would not do for a conductor on 
the New York Central. 

Now, very few of us appreciate precisely the 
amount of growth that starts from nothing and in ten 
years reaches sixty associations and ten thousand mem- 
bers; but it is like everything connected with the rail- 
ways in this country — for that matter, with everything 
else in this country — a marvelous growth. It is dififi- 



CHA UNCE V M. DEPE \V. 485 

cult to undertand or comprehend that it is less than 
sixty years since the first locomotive was seen in 
America; less than sixty years since the first one was 
built by that grand old American, Peter Cooper. 
Uncle Peter saw the locomotive that was brought over 
here from England, and keeping alert, as he always 
did, and up with the progress of the times, he thought 
that whatever an Englishman could do an American 
could do a great deal better. And so he built his 
locomotive — the "Tom Thumb." The stage-coach was 
not going to give up so easily, and they put a swift 
horse on and beat him — the locomotive ran by a band 
passing around a cylinder, and the band slipped off — 
but that is the last time for sixty years and forever, 
that the stage-coach will out-run the locomotive. 
There were only thirteen miles of railroad then in 
the United States; now there are one hundred and 
thirty thousand. A fifty-ton engine takes seventy-five 
cars of twenty tons each and draws them along with- 
out an effort; and as for speed, Mr. Vanderbilt and 
I ran all day long, a short time ago, making an average 
of fifty-four seconds to the mile, running tini.-, and 
without apparently going at half the speed. 

But the greatest, the most satisfactory, feature of 
railroad development is the men engaged in operating 
the roads. With those who are actually in the scr\'icc, 
and those who contribute by .supplies, one-tenth of the 
working force of the United States is in the railroad 
service ; and that tenth includes the most energetic men 
and most intelligent among the workers of this maRnifi- 
cent country. There are ten million work.ng-men in 
this country, and six hundred thousan-I arc directly 



486 ORA TIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

employed in the railway service. With their families 
they constitute a larger population than the largest of 
the States. They are a republic in themselves, and yet 
they are the most loyal, the most law-abiding, and 
most useful and patriotic of citizens. They do not 
seek aggrandizement themselves; they do not seek by 
secrecy and force to accomplish selfish purposes or to 
do injury to anybody; they simply try to live in a 
brotherly way among those who are engaged in other 
pursuits, and to labor for the improvement of the coun- 
try and the elevation of themselves and of their breth- 
ren. Now if this republic of railroad men, in these 
days when all classes of labor are organizing, should 
organize, with their societies, their pass-words, their 
officers, their signs, and their grips, they would con- 
stitute one of the most powerful as well as intelligent 
forces in this Republic for good or for evil. They 
must necessarily, on account of the business they do 
and the responsibilities which devolve upon them, be 
men of character, men of intelligence, and men of 
health ; for upon them devolve a larger responsibility 
and a greater duty than upon any of the workers in 
other pursuits. Men who are engaged in tilling farms, 
in manfactures, or other lines of business, are all depend- 
ent upon the railroads. The railroad man is in a 
sense the servant of them all : he it is that makes the 
farm worth anything; to him are entrusted the prod- 
ucts, the goods, and the lives of the people of the 
country; it is necessary that he above all others should 
be a man upon whom reliance can be placed — a man 
of character, of courage, of strength. 

The railroad is a republic which refutes the theories 



CHA UNCE V M. DEPE I V. 4 8 7 

that come from long-haired men who never work them- 
selves. The worst service that is done to the work- 
ingmen of this country is the lip service of men 
who never work and could not be made to work. 
Now w^e are told that we are in the midst of a con- 
dition of affairs w^here the conflict beween labor and 
capital has become so acute and intense that labor is 
crushed and can never rise. We are told that the 
opportunities which existed in one period of our his- 
tory for a man to better his condition have gone, and 
that they will never come back again. We are told by 
the reporters that my friend Henry George said, in a 
speech at Paterson, that the condition of the laboring 
man is worse than that of the Southern slaves ever 
was. Well, I am a worker myself — my condition is a 
good deal better; you are all workers, and know how 
absurd is all such talk. The railroad refutes these 
theories practically. The railroad has its rules, its con- 
stitutions, its discipline ; but w^hat organization amounts 
to anything without discipline and rule? Rules and 
discipline are not to oppress anybody, not to takeaway 
anybody's rights; but they are to protect the public 
who use the railway on the one hand, anil they arc 
to protect the employee who works for the railway on 
the other; to see that he is not killed by his fellow- 
employees; to see that no carelessness plunges him to 
his death ; to see that he is not robbed or cheated by 
his superior officers; to see that he, as well as cvcr)'- 
body, is protected. 

There is no democracy like the railway system of 
this land. Men are not taken out of rich men's par- 
lors and placed in positions of responsibility. Men 



488 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

are not taken because they are sons of such, and put 
into paying places in the railway system ; but the 
superintendents all over the country — the men who 
officer and man the passenger, the freight, the motive 
power and accounting departments — all of them come 
up from the bottom. And are you going to stop this 
thing? No; there are no men being born, or to be 
born, who are to be by inheritance the superintendents, 
treasurers, comptrollers, auditors, the freight and ticket 
agents, the conductors, the yard-masters — who are to 
be the master-mechanics, the foremen of the shops 
of the future. They are not born. They have got to 
be made, and come from the bottom up. And in 
every one of these departments to-day, in every rail- 
road in the United States, in the humblest positions, 
earning the smallest salaries, are men who within 
the next twenty-five years are to fill all these places by 
promotion. Don't tell me there is no chance to rise 
in this country. There are vacancies to occur in the 
next thirty years in thousands of positions of power, 
and every one of them will be filled by men who prove, 
by coming up grade by grade, that they have got brains 
and courage and power to fit these offices. 

There is another advantage with railroad men, and 
that is the permanence of their employment. Skilled 
mechanics have lay-offs, and hard times when there is no 
work, and periods when through no fault of theirs they 
are compelled to take up any kind of labor which 
offers ; but the employees of the railroad are rarely dis- 
turbed, and almost every good position on our road 
is filled by a man who has been with the company 
more than twenty years. 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. 489 

The best thing I remember connected with myself 
(and a personal incident is ahvays a good one) is.'that 
when I graduated from Yale I thought I would lead 
a life of scholastic ease. I thought I would read and 
write a little, take it easy, and have a good time. I 
had a hard-headed old father of sturdy Holland-Dutch 
ancestry. He had money enough to take care of me, 
and I knew it ; and when he discovered that I knew 
it and intended to act accordingly, it was a cold day 
for me, and he said to me : ,"You will never get a del- 
lar from me except through my will. From this time 
forth you have got to make your own wa\'." Well, I 
found I had a hard lot of it — nobody had a harder 
one — and the old gentleman stood b\- and let me 
tussle and fight it out. I bless him to-night with all 
the heart and gratitude I have for that. If he had 
taken the other course, what would I have done? I 
would have been up in Peekskill to-night nursing a 
stove, cursing the men who had succeeded in the world, 
and wondering by what exceptional luck they had got 
on; but having to dig my way along I got beyond 
everything my father ever dreamed of; but it was 
done by fourteen hours, or sixteen, or eighteen hours 
work a day, if necessary. It is done by temperance. 
by economy; wdien you make a dollar, spend ty. 

five cents and put the other twenty-five by. \io\\\ 
bury savings in a stocking, or put them in Nickel IMalc 
Bonds, but put them in Governm<-' '->"■'- "^ ''^ a 

house and lot. 

Well, the question occurs, as to this vast body of 
young men, who have before them the opportunity 
to rise, to share great places in all the railroads of the 



49° ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

country, ''How are they to be trained, saved from 
temptation, and made better?" Now, I suppose that 
every well-ordered man in the community works about 
ten hours a day. (As I say, 1 work fourteen hours a day, 
and have for twenty years.) I suppose that he takes 
seven hours for sleep, two hours for his meals, that is 
nine ; he has at least four hours left. What is he going 
to do with them? These four hours, if I figure it 
rightly, amount to two months in a year. No man 
can stand still. When Go.d created us he did a fortu- 
nate thing for us : he made us so that we must either 
go back or forward. A man knows more to-day than 
yesterday, or he knows less. A man who sits down 
and bottoms a chair, and gets up and goes to his meals, 
and then goes back and bottoms a chair again, in the 
course of five years will be the biggest dunce in the 
community, and his opinion will not be worth knowing. 
He will lose his power for work and will not be worth 
three cents an hour. A man is just like a locomotive 
always running on an up-grade: Ambition is the 
engineer, Hope the fireman; the stations where he 
stops to take in coal and water are Home, the 
Church, his Society, whatever it may be, associations 
like this, or the Library. There are no brakes on that 
engine, and when he stops and the engineer and fire- 
man jump off, the engine goes down. Now he has 
four hours a day, or two months in a year. What is 
he going to do with them? A gentleman in the com- 
munity — an exceedingly pleasant gentleman — steps up 
to him and says: "I'll tell you what to do, my friend." 
And that gentleman is called the Devil. Some people 
don't believe in a personal Devil; I do. I meet him 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEIV. 491 

every day in my life, and he is one of the most agree- 
able fellows I know. Now he says: "Don't mope 
around home; don't be bothering your head with the 
women ; let the children go to school and take care 
of themseK^es: don't be sitting down and reading 
books and all that sort of thing; what you want is 
recreation." Yes, that's so, he does want recreation; 
he has been at work, perhaps, all night. It may be 
he is a conductor or fireman, or he has been all day in 
the yard or shop. He wants recreation, so the Devil 
takes him into a pool-room and says: "Play a game; 
bet your money." There is one element, one instinct, 
dormant in every man born into this world, and that 
is the instinct of gambling. It is there, and if the 
temptation comes, it is bound to be aroused, and once 
aroused it is the most difficult passion to suppress*. 
The instinct is inflamed, and that young man goes 
home to his wife feverish, irritable ; comes home an- 
other night more irritable, more feverish; hi>.i home 
becomes the last place he wants to see; he anticipates 
his wages; borrows against them, if he is in a place 
where he can do it; he steals; and then he becomes a 
thief and fugitive; and that .settles him. Or the Devil 
takes a young man by the arm and says: "Come into 
the saloon-here is a free lunch, free billiards, free 
dominoes; take them." Then he says to him as he 
croes out: "Are you going to allow the generous land- 
lord to provide all these things and then pay his own 
rent?" "What shall I do?" "Takeadrml ^lone. 

"No- treat somebody, call up the boys. In a little 
while he takes him again. He becomes intoxicate 
he arouses the notice of his superior officers; lu .^ 



49^ ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

discharged; he goes from a house into rooms; from 
rooms into a single room ; his wife becomes wretched 
and miserable; she does what she can to earn some- 
thmg, and his children, from being promising and beau- 
tiful, begin to weaken, go out into the streets and form 
associations, and find them at home in his own lan- 
guage and conduct, that make them subjects for the 
criminal classes of the future. 

Now it behooves railroads, charitable men, religious 
men, and men who are neither charitable nor religious 
but who have homes to take care of and lives that 
they value and want to preserve— it behooves them to 
provide the recreation for this man. Give him a room 
more comfortable than the saloon; larger accommoda- 
tions than the saloon ; games where there is no gam- 
bling; libraries where he can select what is in his bent 
of mind to read ; lectures of the best that the mind 
of men who have devoted their lives to a specific pur- 
pose can produce; the stereopticon that will place 
upon the canvas, almost as real as nature, the cities 
and places of interest throughout the world ; get him 
to bring his wife with him, his children with him and 
make him feel that he is a man, grown larger to-day 
than he was yesterday, to be larger to-morrow than he 
is to-day; that his children are coming up and helping 
him along; that the important places in the rail wa>% 
as they become vacant, are to be his. 

Twenty-five years ago in Peekskill I knew every man 
woman, and child in that place. I was active in every 
work in the town; I belonged to the fire-company; 
I made all the speeches on every occasion, and espe- 
cially at the target shoots. I have presented more 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. 493 

plated ware from men who wanted to be Congressmen, 
county officers, Members of Assembly or justices of the 
peace, and who contributed them as prizes for the 
annual target shoot, than you could count ; and in 
that way I became acquainted with almost everybody 
in Peekskill. And it has been a study with me to 
mark boys who started in every grade of life with 
myself, to see what has become of them. I was up 
last fall and began to count them over, and it was an 
instructive exhibit. Some of them became clerks. 
merchants, manufacturers, lawyers, doctors. It was 
remarkable that every one of those who drank is dead ; 
not one living of my age. Barring a few who were 
taken off by sickness, every one who proved a wreck 
and wrecked his family, did it from rum and no other 
cause. Of those who were church-going people, who 
were steady, industrious, and hard-working men. who 
were frugal and thrifty, every single one of them, with- 
out an exception, owns the house in which he lives, and 
has something laid by, the interest on which, with his 
house, would carry him through many a rainy day. 

Now it is the women that suffer in these things. 
When a man becomes debased with gambling, with 
rum or drink, he doesn't care; all his finer feelings arc 
crowded out. The poor women at home are the ones 
who suffer— suffer in their tenderest emotions: suffer 
in their affections for those whom they hnr better than 

' Let this grand work go on and multiply and rcmul. 
tiply for the safety of the community, the safety of the 
State, and of this Republic, which we all love and hope 
will continue forever. 



494 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 



w 



XL. 

ASHINGTON IrVING, THE FATHER OF AMERICAN 

Literature.— An Address before the Irv- 
ing Club, of Tarrytown, N. Y., April i6 
1887. 



Gentlemen of the Irving Club : 

•Nothing affords me more gratification, as a citizen of 
Westchester County by birth and heredity, than the 
fact of your existence as a club— as a club organized in 
memory of Washington Irving. We have in this coun- 
try St. Andrew's societies; we have St. George's 
societies: we have St. Patrick's societies; we have St. 
Jonathan's societies; every one of them intended to 
celebrate something on the other side, and nothing 
here, except of recent importation. But we have 
become old and venerable enough in this country to 
have societies which shall celebrate something that is 
purely, absolutely, and originally American. You have 
organized to celebrate the birthday, on each recurring 
anniversary, of the father of American literature, and 
your club takes its place as a purely American organi- 
zation, to celebrate that which is purely American in 
Its origin, in its characteristics, in its results, in its 
form. I look forward to the time when the difficulties 
which have been described shall no longer attend the 
traveler making a pilgrimage to Sunnyside. We go, 



Chauncey M. DEPEW. 495 

on the other side, to visit the home, the workshops, of 
the great intellects that have become world-wide in 
their fame, the common heritages of all times and 
races. There is no inspiration I know of to equal 
that of going through the rooms in Stratford-upon- 
Avon — the rooms where Shakespeare was born, — 
touching the things associated with him in tradition, 
viewing all that constituted the resources of his genius. 
There is nothing that I know of to equal a visit to 
Abbotsford, where are the weapons of the warfare 
depicted in Scott' chivalric romances; where is his 
picture gallery, with all the facts from which he got 
the inspiration that gave us Scottish life and Scottish 
legend ; the going up into his workshop, sitting down 
at the very desk where were created those romances 
and those poems which gave him fitly the title of the 
"Wizard of the North." There is nothing so inspiring 
as to go to the home of Bobby Burns; to see the very 
bed on which he first breathed the breath of life ; to 
see the old Bible from which he was instructed; to go 
into the room where he passed his evenings with his 
father and his mother, and to see there the manuscripts 
that have become the home-inspiring love of every 
nationality the globe over. And I hope the time will 
come when, the descendants of Irving having no further 
use for it, Sunnyside will become to Americans, and 
to all visiting America, a rich museum, a home and an 
inspiration, so that, with no other formality than a 
mere presentation at the door, the workshop of the 
father of American literature shall be the common 
heritage of us all. There is nothing so inspires the 
American to the manner born as the name of Wash- 



49*^ ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

ington Irving. It makes no difference whether he was 
born in New York State, or in regions that were 
unknown wildernesses when Irving lived and wrote; 
he represents to us the first breaking from the chrysa- 
lis of that literature which is destined in time to be 
dominant among the literatures of the world. 

He owed his distinction to heredity and to accident. 
We are living in a time when the peculiarities of mental 
forces are being intently studied. The mind-reader 
comes to the front ; he may be the charlatan of to-day, 
or the philosopher of to-morrow. He may be a char- 
latan, but some of his workings are beyond explana- 
tion, or as wonderful in their exposure as in their 
deception. He professes to look into our minds. 
Whether he does or not we do not know, as far as we 
are concerned, but we see extraordinary results that 
we cannot explain so far, or understand. And looking 
through these things I, the most practical of men, 
engaged in the most practical of occupations, have come 
to the conclusion that in the development of the mind 
and the growth of the moral and nervous forces, we may 
reach a point, and things may be accomplished, which 
now seem impossible. But I believe that great minds 
and great geniuses are largely the results of accident, 
and that thousands die out in darkness because the 
accident has not occurred — the opportunity has not 
been presented. Take Washington Irving. His life 
was to be devoted to mercantile pursuits, and if a little 
accident had not occurred to him in his earliest child- 
hood, I believe that his life would have followed out 
the incidents of his heredity — that he would have 
dickered and traded all his days. But while an infant 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. 497 

in his nurse's arms on Broadway, during the passing 
of what would have been in old Roman times a trium- 
phal procession, indicating the resurrection of the Re- 
public, the Father of His Country placed his hands 
upon his head and gave him his blessing. After that 
time it was simply impossible for Washington Irving 
to follow out the instincts of heredity, and to live simply 
for making money. If Washington had never touched 
him, then in the efflorescence of youth he might have 
appeared occasionally in the poet's corner of a local 
paper, and the rest of his life would have been devoted 
to trade. But as the representative of his country he 
grew from actuality into ideality ; he felt the touch of 
those baptismal hands upon his head in early youth, 
inspiring him to something greater, grander, brighter, 
more universal than trade or commerce. In other 
words, they touched the internal sources of the fire 
of genius that might otherwise have remained hidden. 
This is no fancy picture, no phantasy of theory. We 
see his genius first developing in the ludicrous pres- 
entation of the things and the men around him. 
With that, under ordinary circumstances, his genius 
would have been content. He showed thereby simply 
that he was a clever photographer; he photographed 
the peculiar presentations of human nature about him 
in ludicrous forms. But when pushed on by the 
unseen hands of the ghostly spirit of Washington that 
had baptized him in his babyhood, he got to the other 
side ; mingled with the inspirations of his ancestors, 
Scotch and English; stood in Westminster Abbey; 
grasped and breathed in the old breath of English life, 
and the best elements of English thought. Then the 



49^ ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

photographer disappears, and the artist comes to the 
front. Then for the first time was the spark of genius 
struck out, and kindled into flame. You saw some- 
ing in it that you recognized in the wits of Queen 
Anne's time, in the genius of Queen Elizabeth's period. 

A copyist, but beneath the copyist you saw the 
genius that might swell out into the grandest results 
of human achievement. And as the dead hand of 
Washington still reaches out, he grows larger in experi- 
ences of travel, he is more grandly developed in the 
diplomatic mission to Spain, until you find that the 
born genius comes out. The pinched, common Irving 
disappears, and the world-wide representative of litera- 
ture in its best and widest form becomes personified 
under the name of Washington Irving. And this spirit 
follows him through his legends, through his biogra- 
phies, through his stories of travel, until he rests at 
Sunnyside on the Hudson, an old man. He feels that 
for him the days are numbered ; he knows that the 
word has come through him to recognize the Ameri- 
can literature whose existence it had denied ; he feels 
that for him is immortality wherever genius is recog- 
nized, but he feels that his work is not done. The 
unseen hand that baptized him in his youth is still 
pushing on. He says; "I will crown my life, I will end 
my days by writing the history of the man who cre- 
ated me." 

There are other stories of George Washington that 
are childish ; there are other stories that are mere 
chronicles of his deeds; there are other stories that are 
mere collections of his correspondence; but there is 
one story only which represents George Washington as 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. 499 

he was— man, soldier, patriot, stateman, sage, savior 
of his country— and that is the story written by Wash- 
ington Irving. 

Now you go, as I have gone, for a quarter of a cen- 
tury, up and down the Hudson River, day by day, and 
there is no journey you take, I care not how often you 
take it, that does not recall Washington Irving. I never 
in my life have crossed Spuyten Duyvil Creek, that 
I did not see Anthony Van Corlear valiantly plunge 
in and fight the moss-bunkers to reach the other side. 
I never in my life have come by Sunnyside that I was 
not touched by the poetry, by the phantasy, by the 
history that I never knew the full reality of till I stood 
in the house at Stratford-on-Avon, at Abbottsford, 
in the house of Burns. I never go to my home at Peeks- 
kill, where I was born, which looks out on the finest 
bay, the noblest sheet of water in the world, which puts 
into simple insignificance the Bay of Naples, and gaze 
across at the old Dunderberg, and the punchbowl, and 
St. Anthony's Nose, which enclose it, that I do not 
think of that storm which sent the echoes reverber- 
ating from one peak to another, till all that is sublime 
in nature was exhibited in Peekskill Bay. And how 
many other associations there are ! Going across the 
marsh beyond Tarrytown I look beyond the river and 
see the bridge where Ichabod Crane on that famous 
night saw the head of the ghost taken up and hurled 
at him, and his courtship and his usefulness were alike 
ended. And I see the old church of Revolutionary 
times, and I know that there in its peaceful graveyard 
rest the remains of the one man whose name in Ameri- 
can literature is inspiration and fame. Then, as the 



5QO ORA TIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

Catskills appear in view, with all their weird character- 
istics, I feel that Rip Van Winkle has crossed the 
stream, and is losing his way in their fastness. And if, 
as often chances, there is a storm, I hear in the reverb- 
erations of the hills the ghostly crew of Hendrick 
Hudson, teaching him the inevitable — for what? I 
do not think we in America have ever appreciated the 
wonderful philosophy of Washington Irving. There 
are libraries in Germany for developing and explaining 
the philosophy of Goethe. But what is the teaching of 
the myriad-minded man who was the genius of Ger- 
many? It all goes out into that wonderful poem and 
romance of "Faust." And what does that teach? That 
the Spirit of Sensuality, among the thunders and light- 
nings of the Brocken, leads the old man whose soul 
is sold to him to perdition. 

But who cares for an old man? The gold of Faust's 
life was gone; there was nothing left for him to teach; 
and in his old age, when his powers were decaying, and 
his usefulness was gone, in a dream of wild sensualitv 
he surrendered himself to death for its gratification. 
His fate teaches no lessons; the world has met with no 
loss. But in Rip Van Winkle a chord is touched of 
more world-wide significance than any that is touched 
in Faust. Washington Irving has taken a youth given 
over to intemperance, to idleness and to utter inability 
to control any of his desires. And what does he do 
with him? He leads him through a life wherein is 
exhibited his utter uselessness to himself — a curse to 
his family, a perfect and constantly spreading example 
of evil to all about him. He carries him up to the 
mountains, as Goethe carried his hero to the Brocken. 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. 5°! 

And he is dropped into — a dream ; not into perdition. 
At the end of twenty years he comes forth — for what? 
The critic of the past says, "For a joke." The critic 
of the present says, "For humor." Ah, no; they do 
not understand the philosopher. He comes forth, after 
twenty years of sleep, for a deeper lesson than Faust 
ever taught. He comes back to the scenes of his 
youth to find that his son, who ought, in this country, 
to have been a man of vigor and enterprise, taking a 
leading part in political and social things, is a drunkard, 
an outcast, a loafer, the worthless curse of the com- 
munity — a reproduction of himself in his destruction 
of all social ties and disregard of all political duties, an 
example of all that is bad for the community about 
him. No lesson of temperance, no lesson of a decent 
life, of industry, of adherence to the principles of virtue, 
was ever taught more plainly, more beautifully, and 
with more living and practical force, than in the story 
of Rip Van Winkle. 

Now, to show you how little, in our time, in this home 
of Mammon and of Philistinism, Washington Irving is 
understood, I record simply an incident that occurred 
at our dinner two or three years ago. When the 
dinner was over, a couple of the most successful brokers 
on Wall Street stood at the door, and one of them 
asked me to come out, and I went. They said: 
"Depew, what is all this about?" "Well," I said, "we 
are celebrating the birthday of Washington Irving." 
And then one of them, after looking up at Dr. Peters 
for a little while, said : "Well, isn't the old gentleman 
a little full?" Now, it is one of the missions of the 
Irving Club to educate such Philistines. I sometimes 



502 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

think, as I muse on the literature of America, in the 
little time I have for musing — I, who have only a few 
hours which should be devoted to sleep, which I give 
to literature and to thought, only a few hours on the 
Sunday, which should be given to devotion, but which 
I give to literature and to thought — I have sometimes 
mused, when another century shall have passed by, and 
its jury comes to pass upon the first century of the 
Republic, what reputations will live? Our literature 
for the last hundred years is rich in poetry — one of 
whose writers is in Westminster Abbey, — rich in fic- 
tion, rich in the works of historians and philosophers. 
Who will live? I believe that when the jury of the 
second century comes to pass upon the first, that 
there will be larger poets than the first has created, 
greater philosophers than the first has known, more 
comprehensive historians than the first has seen, essay- 
ists of a grasp far beyond anything that the first has 
contemplated. And I believe that in the second cen- 
ury there will be but two names that will live to be 
enshrined in the temple that it passes down to the 
third, of all that it received from the first, and those 
two names will be Washington Irving and Fenimorc 
Cooper. And that will be for the fact that they arc 
simply and only of America — that they have occupied 
their genius with things that are entirely and only 
American. By that time the Indian race will have 
disappeared from the continent, to be remembered only 
as a dream. Lo, the poor Indian, will then have been 
etherealized to a form in which he would not know 
himself. And Fenimore Cooper will live, not because 
his romances are the equals, or the superiors, of Scott's 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. 503 

or of Thackeray's or of Dickens's, but because they 
represent the Indian as the second century will love to 
recreate him, and will paint him in its pictures, and 
will present him in its comedies and tragedies. And 
Washington Irving will live because the Hudson will 
live. So long as the Rhine is the inspiration of Europe, 
so long will the Hudson be the inspiration of the 
romance and the poetry of America. And every spot 
upon the Hudson, as the centuries roll on, will be 
more picturesque and more beautiful, because around 
it centers so much that will carry the undying fame 
and memory of Washington Irving, the Father of 
American Literature. 



504 OR A TIONS AND SPEECHES OF 



F 



XLI. 

ROM A Speech before the College Republican 
CampaiGxN Club of Prlnceton, New Jersey, 
October 13, 1884. 



An eminent college President has said that there has 
been no time since the war when a young man knew 
how he could honorably serve his country. Surely 
this is a pessimistic view to present to the cultured 
youth of America. It is too narrow a basis for college 
men to stand upon. What questions have occupied 
the statesmen of the world for the last twenty years? 
In Germany, unity of the race, with imperialism ; in 
Italy, consolidation of the people, with constitutional 
monarchy; in France, republicanism not yet attained; 
in England, the extension, with restrictions, of the suf- 
frage at home, the extension of English trade interests 
abroad ; while, in the United States, problems of far 
greater moment in themselves and in their relations to 
the welfare of mankind have been successfully solved, 
and invariably by the Republican Party. Four millions 
of slaves have not only been freed, but they have been 
made sharers in political power and responsibility, and 
peaceably incorporated into the body politic. The 
Civil War has been settled with marvelous moderation 
and mercy. The currency has been funded. The 



CHA UNCE Y M. DEPE IV. 505 

debt has been reduced one-half, credit restored, the 
finances placed upon a sound basis, specie resumption 
secured, and the Republic has enjoyed a period of 
unparalleled growth and prosperity. The statesman- 
ship which accomplished these results has not been 
surpassed in our history. To devise and successfully 
carry through the measures which sustained and trium- 
phantly bore the Government through all these trials 
demanded the best culture, training, ability, and sensi-' 
tive honor in the land. The broad and comprehensive , 
mind of your President, James McCosh, could never, . 
under any circumstances of excitement, disappoint- ' 
ment, or exasperation, have been led into a declaration 
like this which comes to us from Harvard, nor will 
Harvard herself indorse the hasty expressions of her 
distinguished President. 

All of you cast this time your first vote. I know of 
no occasion more solemn than this act, when the State 
recognizes your manhood, and in exercising your rights 
as citizens you become both sovereigns and statesmen. 
For to the extent of your influence each determines 
for himself the government for fifty-five million of 
people for four years to come. Upon the ballot-box 
as an altar you are wedded to the political principles of 
your life. That they will largely govern your whole 
conduct and career all experience teaches. If I may 
follow the marriage figure, on the one side she beckons 
you, whose face is ever turned to the past. Her judg- 
ment is guided by the prejudices of the dark ages of 
the Republic, and her mind is clouded by exploded 
legends and superstition. Her wedding-robes are 
stained with the best blood of the country, poured out to 



So6 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

pursue or prevent her follies or her crimes, and in the 
vain effort to bring her in sympathy and accord with 
his patriotism, his requirements, and his aspirations, the 
young man who espouses her will cry out with the 
Apostle, "Oh, wretched man that I am ! who shall 
deliver me from the body of this death?" 

On the other side, in all her radiant beauty, stands 
the daughter of liberty. At her touch the shackles 
have fallen from the slave, by her inspiration Union 
and Freedom were saved for mankind. For her the 
soldier marched. By her the hero was pensioned and 
the rebel forgiven, and the Republic as it is, many- 
fold better, greater, richer and happier than it ever was, 
bears tribute to her genius. The one controlling prin- 
ciple governing all about her is that, forever, to-morrow 
and to-morrow shall be a grand and beneficent ad- 
vance from yesterday. Beside me, as I was speaking 
last week, sat a venerable man of ninety-five years. 
Said he : "I want to cast one more vote before God 
takes me home, and if there is any lesson derived from 
my long life and from the eighteen ballots I have cast 
for Presidents of the United States, the nineteenth 
and the last will be given for the Republican Party." 
From this long record, covering the most important 
period of our history, turn back to the present, and 
a first vote is to be thrown in this year of startling 
significance. The eldest son of James A. Garfield 
becomes of age on November first, and votes on No- 
vember fourth. With him is a memory which over- 
shadows that ballot. His father was the typical 
American, who went from the towpath to the plow, 
from the plow to the school, from the school to the 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. 5^7 

academy, from the academy to the college, from the 
college to the professor's chair, and thence among the 
scholars of the land ; the citizen who, when the drum 
beat to arms, became the soldier, the Colonel, the 
Brigadier-General, the Major-General, every step made 
in battle ; the citizen who, at the call of civic duty, 
went from school-board to the Legislature, from the 
Legislature to Congress, from Congress to the Chief 
Magistracy of the Nation, from the Presidency to a 
martyr's grave. You and I believe that in the dread 
unknown the loved ones who have gone before hover 
over and in numberless ways direct those who linger 
here, and with that record and the spirit of his great 
father behind him the son of Garfield will cast his vote 
for Blaine and Logan. 



5o8 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 



T 



XLII. 

HE Friendships of Politics. — From a Speech 
AT the Dinner given by State Senator Mc- 
Carthy TO THE Senate of New York, Febru- 
ary 20, 1884. 



There is one theme suggested by a gathering like 
this upon which too little is said, but that little is 
pure misrepresentation. It is the comment that 
friendships in politics are impossible, and that the rela- 
tions of men active in public affairs are more selfish, 
uncertain, and treacherous than in any other depart- 
ment of life. Those of us who have been practical 
workers for years know how false is this generalization. 
When a man has passed forty years of age the friends 
of school or college days are dead or lost. These 
fierce competitions of business, with its sharp and mer- 
ciless struggle for the mastery, confine one's confidences 
to his partners of the hour. Old associates die, and 
after the tears of the moment they are forgotten ; they 
move away, and after the embrace and good-by comes 
oblivion; they become bankrupts, but our sympathy 
and regrets do not reach our pockets or transfer our 
capital to their use for the restoration of their fortunes. 
So that men would be left without any of the unsel- 
fish attachments of youth, without that enthusiasm 
for a man or a cause which makes the term "the boys" 



CHA UNCE Y M. DEPE W. 5^9 

equally applicable to the young and the old, and 
become isolated, narrowed, dried up within the family 
circle, were it not for the associations of politics. Believ- 
ing in the same principles, members of the same party, 
inspired with that esprit de corps which, in all ages, 
has formed, in times of trial, heroes, patriots, martyrs, 
men work together in the caucus or convention, fight 
together at the polls for the triumph of a common 
cause, and shout or share in victory or defeat. They 
will open their pocket-books to contribute money, and 
close their places of business to give their time for 
candidate or friend without hope or expectation of any 
other reward than his success. They will endure dis- 
comforts, hardships, travel, rough riding over country 
roads to elect a favorite. They will make exertions 
and sacrifices to help a companion who is down, when 
business and other friends pass by on the other side. 
From such men, sure of the attachments behind them, 
and in close communion with the popular pulse, comes 
our best statesmanship. They may be new to public 
life, but they are familiar with public affairs, and take 
broad and healthy views of current questions. Great 
popular convulsions have occasionally projected into 
J representative positions the dainty gentlemen who 
ignore politics and despise politicians. Their work is 
worthless and their careers visionary. Their ignorance 
makes them the easy prey of sharpers, their vanity 
and opinionatedness keep them above and beyond popu- 
lar sympathies and desires. Their perpetual posings 
as probable Governors or Presidents render them the 
most unsociable and uncomfortable companions of all 
human creatures, and the closest communion with 



5IO ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

them which is either possible or desirable is the oppo- 
site side of a ten-acre lot. Our host of to-night, who 
has full rounded the Psalmist's span of threescore and 
ten, with his mental and physical vigor unimpaired, 
overcoming the ordinary and usual cares and weak- 
nesses of age by active interest and participation in the 
living issues and contests of the day, surrounded here 
by colleagues who, without regard to party affiliations, 
are his personal friends, and sustained at home by 
hosts of men who have become attached to him by a 
half-century of political warfare, is a splendid example 
of the preservative and conservative tendencies of the 
friendships of politics. 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. 511 



s 



XLIII. 

PEECH AT THE DINNER GIVEN TO SOUTHERN GOV- 
ERNORS BY THE Southern Society of New York, 
May 2, 1889. 



Gentlemen : 

I was never more impressed with the fact that the 
inspiration and the home of oratory is in the South 
than by the speech just made by the Vice-President 
of the United States. We have been trying here in 
the North for a quarter of a century to get him to 
make a speech without avail, and lo ! the first time he 
is brought before an assemblage of Southern men, he 
at once follows in the footsteps of Calhoun, Clay, and 
Henry. The finest speech Mr. Morton ever made 
in my presence was last autumn, when he said to me : 
"Depew, if I were you, situated as you are, and with 
your responsibilities, I wouldn't think of accepting a 
Presidential nomination." I took his advice, and left 
the field open for the Vice-Presidential nomination to 
come to the State of New York. I never realized 
this until after the election, when it was too late. This 
episode has given me doubts as to whether the law is 
a good profession for a young man to follow. I rather 
think that to be really successful one should be a 
banker. 

I can speak for New York in bidding you welcome. 



5 1 2 ORA TIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

for I can trace my lineage back to her early settlers — 
even if I was not in the Centennial quadrille. New 
York loves the stranger — and to take him in. During 
this week she has forgotten her commercial supremacy 
in her efforts to show her hospitality to her visitors. 

The significance of this celebration is understood 
very little by any of us, and it will be better under- 
stood by those who read, or hear my recent oration 
read, at the celebration one hundred years hence. I 
was much impressed when I saw the men of all nations 
parading the streets yesterday with the Stars and Stripes 
waving above them, seeing nowhere the red flag of 
communism, or the black flag of anarchy, and I felt 
that they had been baptized in the spirit of patriotism, 
New York is the home of all people, no matter from 
whence they come, and I would like to have the South- 
ern people in particular consider the metropolis their 
abiding-place, for none are more welcome than they. I 
hope that the Southern people will aid us in correcting 
the abuses at elections — abuses that threaten the integ- 
rity and honor of our Government — and I believe they 
will. The danger that confronts us in this direction is 
most serious, but our people, whether of the North or 
South, are equal to overthrowing it, and I know they 
will. This is no time for pessimists. I would like to 
see the whole sky of the future — top, sides, horizon and 
all — painted red. 

I learned the Southern spirit well as treasurer of the 
fund for the establishment of a home for Confederate 
soldiers at Austin, Texas. I am sorry to say that the 
fund raised was not large, but the subscriptions were 
many, and in very small sums — widows' mites, as it 



CHA UNCE Y M. DEPE W. 5 » 3 

were. Eight-tenths of these contributions came from 
men who had fought in the Federal Army through the 
War. I am glad they were in the majority of the 
subscribers. It shows that we can love a foe who had 
the courage to fight and die for his opinions. It 
showed that we can rise above humanity to heavenly 
traits. 



5H ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 



XLIV. 

An Interview with Emperor William. 

Probably the briefest speech Mr. Depew ever made in public 
was in presenting a tribute of flowers to Kaiser Wilhelm L, in be- 
half of the Americans sojourning at Salzburg. The occasion was 
described as follows, in a cablegram dated Salzburg, August 12 
1886: 

Emperor William of Germany arrived at Salzburg 
to-day on his way from the meeting at Gastein to 
Berlin. A journey of four hours in a carriage to the 
station and three hours travel by rail, with the mercury 
at 90°, told on his ninety years, and he appeared feeble. 
The American guests of the hotel here sent flowers to 
him with expressions of respect. On leaving Salzburg 
he requested the Americans to assemble in the large 
hall of the hotel, where he shook hands cordially with 
each man, woman and child, and spoke to them all in 
German. His grandson. Prince William, son of the 
Crown Prince, translating his remarks, said : 

"The Emperor thanks the Americans for their court- 
esy, and expresses his profound admiration for the 
American people." 

Chauncey M. Depew answered : 

"The three millions of Germans in America are among 
our best citizens, but what they give to us takes noth- 
ing from their love for the Fatherland. They have 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. 5^5 

taught to fifty million Americans the deepest esteem 
and veneration for their Emperor and the great peo- 
ple he so wisely governs." 

The Prince expressed for the Emperor renewed 
thanks for these cordial sentiments. The Emperor 
took the Americans' basket of flowers with him in 
his car. 



5i6 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 



s 



XLV. 

Withdrawal from the Presidential Race. 

PEECH at the Republican National Conven- 
tion at Chicago, June 22, 1888. 



Mr. Chairman and Gentlemen of the Con- 
vention : 

i came here as a delegate-at-large from the State of 
New York, neither expecting nor desiring to appear in 
this Convention or before it in any other capacity. 
After my arrival, the representatives of New York, by a 
unanimous vote, presented my name to this Conven- 
tion. It was done for State reasons, in the beHef that 
because it was the only time since the organization of 
the Republican Party that all divisions were healed 
and all interests united in the Empire State, it would 
secure in that commonwealth the triumph of the 
ticket. Under these conditions personal considera- 
tions and opinions could have no possible weight. 
Since then a discussion has arisen which has convinced 
me that my vocation and associations will raise a ques- 
tion in hitherto certain Republican States which might 
enable the enemy to obscure the great issue of the 
future industrial prosperity of this country, which unless 
obscured in some way will surely win us success this 



CHA UNCE V M. DEPE W. 5^7 

fall. The delegates from New York have voted to 
continue in this support so long as ballots were to be 
taken, but under the circumstances, after the most ear- 
nest and prayerful consideration, I came to the conclu- 
sion that no personal considerations, no State reasons, 
could stand for a moment in the way of the general 
success of the party all over the country, or could be 
permitted to threaten the integrity of the party in 
any commonwealth hitherto Republican, In our own 
State, by wise laws and wiser submission to them by 
the railroad companies, the railway problem has been 
so completely settled that it has disappeared from our 
politics. But I believe that there are communities 
where it is still so active that there may be danger in 
having it presented directly or indirectly. Under 
these circumstances, and after your vote this morning, 
I called on the delegation from my own State and re- 
quested them to release me from further service in that 
capacity. They have consented, and my only excuse 
in appearing here is to give the reasons for their action, 
and for the appearance of my name, and to express my 
heartfelt thanks to gentlemen from the States and 
Territories who have honored me with their votes. 
The causes which have led to this action on the part of 
the Representatives from the State of New York, 
will leave no heartburnings among the people in that 
State. The delegation will go home to a constituency 
which was unanimously for me, to find it unanimous in 
the support of whomsoever may be the nominee of 
the Convention. 



5i8 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 



R 



XLVI. 

EPLY TO Friends who Greeted Him in New 
York Bay, on His Return from Europe, Sep- 
tember 13, 1888. 



My Friends: 

If you are as glad to see me as I am to see you, there 
has never been a happier party cruising about New 
York Bay. On the other side I was advised by shrewd 
pohticians, who informed me that I had a brilhant 
poHtical future before me — a fact which was empha- 
sized before I went away from home — that I must not 
make Mr. Blaine's mistake and come home in a British 
steamer. As home rule has not progressed sufficiently 
to give us an Irish line of steamers, I did the next best 
thing and took a German boat. And I must say that 
from sauerkraut to seamanship everything on it was 
sublime. Politics on the other side of the water are 
so mixed that I am glad there are none in this recep- 
tion. In England they have concluded that the Re- 
publican Party favors free whisky, and they think 
that consequently the Democratic Party favors prohibi- 
tion ! A distinguished Englishman informed me that 
he thought free trade would stand a better chance in 
this campaign if the Democrats were not all teeto- 
talers. 

Only one thing is better than going abroad ; that is 



CHA UNCE Y M. DEPE W. 519 

getting back. Nothing cultivates and develops the 
American spirit more than a visit abroad. If all our 
Anarchists and Communists and dissatisfied elements 
could be put in a position to spend three months in the 
study of Europe, they would come back better Ameri- 
cans. And any satisfied American who can do the 
same is sure to return an enthusiast, with red, white 
and blue flags all over his coat. England's hospitality 
is delightful, but the most satisfactory country to live 
and to die in is the United States. 

When he goes abroad for the first time, the Ameri- 
can looks after the antique, including the baronial cas- 
tle in which his ancestors were born, and which he 
usually finds out is only one story high. He visits the 
places where from degradation arose the principles of 
liberty; the cathedrals that symbolized in stone the 
religion of the race until it was expressed in a better 
form — the spirit ; he sees the wonderful canvases of the 
masters, and returns a broader, richer, fuller man. 
The second time he goes abroad it is generally for the 
scenes ; but he returns convinced that there is no scenery 
in the world that equals that of the United States. 
On his third visit he wishes to study the institutions of 
the Old World, and he finds that there can be no 
comparison. Rich in antiquity Europe may be, but in 
all that pertains to the present or the future America 
is vastly in the lead. When he goes abroad the Ameri- 
can delights to meet the great men who make the 
history of their day, and the more he can mingle with 
them the better for his education, his statesmanship. 
his citizenship. 

This year I had an hour's talk with him who com- 



52p ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

mands the attention of the civihzed world in his states- 
manship — William E. Gladstone. He said to me: 
"Sixty years ago I read Chief-Justice Marshall's Life of 
Washington, and I was forced to the conclusion that he 
was quite the greatest man that ever lived. The sixty 
years that have passed have not changed that impression, 
and to any Englishman who seeks my advice in the line 
of his development and equipment, I invariably say : 
"Begin by reading the Life of George Washington." I 
also met John Morley and Arthur Balfour, and while 
it would not be right to repeat our conversation, I may 
say that I formed the impression that types continue 
the same in all ages, whatever be the modifications of 
environment. If these two men could be placed back 
in the times of the Stuarts, I am convinced that Mor- 
ley would be a Roundhead and Balfour would be a 
Cavalier. 

One thing, my friends, that impresses an American 
abroad more than any other, is the infinite superiority 
of our economic and industrial system, especially as 
he realizes that the whole Continent is an armed camp. 
He sees there ten million men at the command of govern- 
ment for war purposes, with all business based on the 
need of being ready for the great war daily expected. 
He sees all the young men of Europe in the barracks 
or marching on the highway, with the women driven 
into the field to labor. He sees half the population 
daily drilling in the art of murder, and the other half 
taxed to support them in their hideous work. When 
you see this picture and then compare it with our coun- 
try, with an army invisible except with the aid of a 
microscope, and with a navy that a canal-boat can run 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. 521 

down ; when you see a system under which no burden 
can be put upon the people, save that which they will- 
ingly bear to meet an honest debt incurred in a war 
for their preservation ; when you see everything har- 
monized to work for the best development of the coun- 
try and the highest improvement of its citizenship, then 
you feel when you come back that truly there is no 
place like home. 



522 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 



T 



XLVII. 

HE Christian Faith.— Reply to John Fiske, 
AT A Meeting of the Nineteenth Century 
Club, March 3, 1886. 



I NEVER felt so absolutely out of place. I am a prac- 
tical man, overwhelmed with the cares of business. It 
is exceedingly difficult for me to get on the plane of 
philosophic thought. I am a practical man. I believe 
in the Old Testament and the New Testament precisely 
as they are presented by Christianity. I am in antag- 
onism to Mr. Wakeman, who dismisses the Bible as 
entirely a mess of legend, and with Prof. Fiske, who 
accepts it with an interpretation entirely his own. 

It was the atheism of France that taught license for 
liberty and led to the French Revolution. Where are 
those old philosophies and the old philosopher? They 
are dead, while Christianity survives. The school of 
atheism led to despair. Materialism soon found that 
every violation of the moral law could go on consistently 
with its teachings. So pantheism and positivism have 
followed only to be destroyed, and now we have the 
school of humanity and the cosmic philosophy coming 
close to the borders of Christianity as expounded by 
John Fiske. 

They tell us there is no more Creator, only a cosmic 



CHA UNCE Y M. DEPE IV. 



523 



dust. Who made the dust ? There is only protoplasm, 
indeed. Who made protoplasm? They tell us of evo- 
lution from dust to monkey and then to man ; but all 
the scientists have never found the missing link. The 
simple gospel of the humble son of a carpenter, preached 
by twelve fishermen, has survived the centuries and out- 
lives all other philosophies of eighteen hundred years. 

I am not versed in the terminology of the philoso- 
phies. I believe them to be of little use to reach the 
hearts and to influence the actions of simple men. There 
is no liberty that lasts in the world, and there is no 
government which has liberty in it that lasts, that does 
not recognize the Bible. What is the object of all 
theology? It is to reach the human heart and to con- 
trol the actions of men as they are. 

How many of us can even understand what the 
philosopher says? You might take the whole Stock 
Exchange and read Kant to them, and it would be 
utterly incomprehensible to them. Not so with the 
teachings of the Golden Rule. They could understand 
at least what that means. I read Mr. Wakeman's pam- 
phlet last night. They tell us God must disappear; 
that prayer is begging; that the Holy Communion is 
cannibalism. When did such a religion send out a 
missionary? When you show me a colony of ten thou- 
sand people who have come to live decently by its 
teachings, I may believe it. But I say now that the 
Christian faith of my mother is good enough for me. 
If we believe this faith, what harm? If we disbelieve it, 
and thereby do wrong, what of our future? 



^^4 O/^A TIONS AND SPEECHES OF' 



A 



XLVIII. 

RGUMENT BY ChAUNCEY M. DePEW BEFORE 

THE United States Senate Committee, Jan- 
uary II, 1890, ON the Quadri-Centennial 
Celebration. 



Mr. Chairman and Gentlemen of the Committee : 

The New York Delegation expresses its thanks to 
the Committee for according to it a hearing on a day 
when so many could attend. We are here to the num- 
ber of over a hundred. Most of the delegates leave 
large business interests and pressing duties at home, 
and they fairly represent the activities and enterprise 
of New York City and State. The object of their visit 
is to impress upon you the claims of New York for the 
World's Fair of 1892. 

Any American who visited the great Exhibition at 
Paris last summer was impressed with the fact that 
there was a great necessity upon the people of the 
United States in the near future to have one which 
would be equal, if not better. It was in all respects 
the most superb collection of the evidences of the de- 
velopment of different nations in their arts, industries 
and mechanical work which has ever been gathered. 
The nations of Continental Europe, of Asia, of Africa, 
of Great Britain and her dependencies round the globe, 
Mexico and the South American republics, in their 



CHA UNCE V M. DEPE W. 525 

buildings and in their exhibits presented superb illus- 
trations of their products and skill. 

The United States alone was utterly deficient in any- 
adequate representation of its resources, its inventions, 
or its mechanical powers. The impression left upon 
the representatives of the different peoples of the earth 
was that America might have vast area, great popula- 
tion and free institutions, but that for commercial pur- 
poses, in the interchange of commodities which the 
world needed, or in supplying those which were re- 
quired by its different markets, she was unequal to the 
competition with older nations. The main attraction 
of the American exhibit was petrified wood from Ari- 
zona. An English delegate, desiring to alleviate my 
mortification, said : "Your country's exhibit of petrified 
wood is unequaled in this Fair." The effect of this has 
been to do incalculable injury to our commercial future. 
The commissions appointed by the several governments 
and the merchants from all parts of the globe carried 
back to their people accounts of the products and 
manufactures which cannot fail to be enormously bene- 
ficial to the countries which were properly represented, 
and injurious to the United States. It will take a quar- 
ter of a century by the ordinary methods of trade to 
place the United States properly before the world. 

The largest manufacturing nation is compelled in the 
most marked and the quickest way to exhibit its re- 
sources and skill. This can only be done by an inter- 
national fair in the United States so comprehensive as 
to fitly present all that we have and all that we can do, 
and so broadly national and hospitable as to invite and 
secure the attendance of every other nation. So that 



526 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

at the threshold of this discussion we must dismiss the 
fallacy which has been urged by the advocates of St. 
Louis and Chicago, that this is a national and not an 
international fair. Unless international, there is no 
purpose in holding it. The marvelous development of 
transportation lines and methods of rapid communica- 
tion within the United States has put into the posses- 
sion of every market so intelligently the products and 
opportunities of every other market, that no purely 
national fair would either add to our information or to 
our prosperity. 

It is in this sense of an international fair, held for the 
purpose of impressing upon the world the fact that we 
can supply the articles needed for its necessities and its 
luxuries, as well and as artistically made, and as cheaply 
sold as they can be purchased anywhere else, that New 
York becomes the only place where such an exhibition 
can be successfully held. All the visitors from abroad 
will come first to New York. If, in addition to the 
3000 miles of ocean travel, there is presented to them 
the further necessity of breaking bulk, and traveling 
with their goods a thousand miles into the interior, it 
would deter many of them from coming. 

The experience and the expense of the carrying of 
goods and of persons among the older nations of the 
world is such as to make them dread great distances of 
land travel, carrying with them valuable and bulky 
goods. It has been urged that, because only 125,000 
Americans visited the Fair at Paris, and possibly not 
more than 75,000 foreigners would visit the Fair in 
America, they are not to be considered as an important 
element in the success of the undertaking. 



CHA UNCE Y M. DEPE W. 5^7 

But, while there will probably be 30,000,000 of visi- 
tors to the Exposition, whose gate money will pay its 
expenses, and whose presence will attract the merchant 
and the manufacturer and the artist to exhibit, the 
100,000 foreigners who may be there will represent 
hundreds of millions of people, to whom they are to 
carry a favorable or an unfavorable report of the com- 
mercial opportunities of the United States. We have 
had recently in Washington two congresses, one the 
Pan-American, and the other the Maritime, which num- 
bered less than 100 delegates to each, and yet the one 
was the expression of the statesmanship and the com- 
mercial aspirations of Mexico and the South American 
republics, and the other represented authoritatively the 
position upon questions affecting the great highways of 
commerce upon the ocean, the opinions to be crystal- 
lized into international law, of all the maritime nations 
of the eiobe. So the commissioners from the various 
States, and the keen-eyed merchants who bring their 
wares, will carry back to every port which a steamer 
can enter or where a flag can float, the story of the vast 
resources, of the wonderful inventions, of the unequaled 
mechanical skill, of the enormous surplus of manufac- 
tured products to be stimulated by opportunity, which 
the world wants and which America wants to sell. 

No fair has ever been successful unless held in the 
metropolis of the nation which authorized the exhibi- 
tion. When, freed from sectional ambitions or jeal- 
ousies at home, we view with impartial eye the situa- 
tion abroad, we all admit that exhibitions held for 
Great Britain at Liverpool or Manchester, for France 
at Lyons or Marseilles, for Italy at Florence or Naples, 



528 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

for Germany at Dresden or Leipzig, would be failures; 
while it has been demonstrated from past experience 
that exhibitions held at the metropolis of any country, 
like London or Paris, are successful in attracting all 
that there is of the country in which the city is located, 
as well as all the world besides. 

I saw two years ago an attempted Universal Exposi- 
tion at Liverpool, which, though excellent in every way, 
attracted little attention even in Great Britain ; while 
two local exhibitions, held within the past three years 
in London, one called "The Healtheries" and the other 
called "The Italian," were almost equal to the French 
Fair of last summer in attendance, in value and variety 
of exhibits and in results. This was due to the great 
resident population within cheap and quick transit, and 
the vast number of strangers always present in London 
and who made part of the daily crowds at the fairs. 

No one will dispute that New York is the metropolis 
of this continent. Its population, its resources, the 
representative character of its business, the fact that 
three-fourths of the imports of the country come to its 
harbor, all make it such. 

There is not a cotton or woolen mill, a furnace, forge 
or factory, a mine at work or projected in the United 
States, which does not have its principal office in the 
city of New York. There is no project of any kind, 
whether to build a railroad, to bring agricultural terri- 
tory into settlement and market, to develop the re- 
sources of the New South, to open iron or coal veins 
in Virginia, Tennessee or Alabama, which does not pass 
all other places and come to New York. If it is unsuc- 
cessful there, it goes nowhere else. The conventions of 



CHA tJNCE Y M. DEPE VV. 529 

all the trades, which are annually held for mutual bene- 
fit, take place in New York, and are all closed with an 
annual banquet, which I invariably attend. A panic in 
New York is the paralysis of the country. Prosperity 
in New York means immense freight upon the railways, 
and enormous production from farm and factory and 
mine. New York does not influence, but simply records 
as the barometer the conditions of trade and produc- 
tion all over the country. 

To make a fair successful, a population immediately 
in contact is absolutely necessary. The French Fair 
had its thirty millions of visitors, and its 200,000 a day, 
because it was in the midst of a great resident popula- 
tion, which, for a few cents, and with the least loss of 
time, could repeatedly visit the Exhibition, St. Louis 
and Chicago present the most fallacious of arguments 
in their famous "circles of population." A circle about 
St. Louis, of 500 miles to the Gulf of Mexico and the 
Atlantic Ocean, may have twenty-seven millions. A 
similar circle about Chicago, to the North Pole and the 
Pacific Ocean, may have twenty-five millions. A similar 
circle about New York may have twenty-two millions. 
A similar circle about Washington may have twenty 
millions; and, without much difflculty, by this process 
of calculation we shall have within these circles, for 
the purposes of this Fair, three or four hundred 
millions of people, and yet not include over one-half of 
the present located population of the United States. 

A similar circle drawn with Peekskill as a center — a 
village upon the Hudson where I was born — takes in 
the Hudson River and the Mohawk valleys, with their 
continuous villages and cities and unequaled scenery, 



530 OR A TIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

includes New York, Boston, and Philadelphia, New 
Haven, Hartford, and Baltimore, and presents a com- 
pact population which in wealth, in ability to travel, in 
appreciation of exhibitions and determination to visit 
them, is unequaled anywhere in the country. But then, 
Peekskill is deficient in hotel accommodations and in 
internal lines of travel necessary to carry vast masses 
to a fair ground and to take them comfortably away. 
Besides, Peekskill is not here asking for the Fair. The 
success of an exhibition is in populations in contact 
with the fair. Take a point centrally located at Jersey 
City, and draw about it a radius of equal diameter and 
extent to a line drawn from a point at Lake Michigan 
around the boundaries of Chicago, arid you have a 
larger population than there is in the city of Chicago. 
You cross the river by ferry, and you have on the island 
of Manhattan the city of New York, with 600,000 
more people than there are in Chicago. You cross to 
Long Lsland by the Brooklyn Bridge, and a circle again 
thrown out, covering again the same territory on Long 
Lsland as is included in the boundaries of Chicago, has 
more population than there is in Chicago. So that, 
within what might properly be called the city of New 
York, there are three Chicagos and a half. 

Then, taking Central Park as a center, within a radius 
of 200 miles, including the points from which people 
can come in the morning and to which they can go 
back at night, there are 8,000,000 of people. The 
lunch-basket and dinner-pail brigade — the real sup- 
porters of a fair, who can get there for a minimum of 
five cents and a maximum of $2 — to the number of not 
less than 8,000,000 are tributary to the New York 



CHA UNCE Y M. DEPE W. 531 

Exhibition. That of itself makes it a phenomenal 
success, and can be met by no similar fact from any 
other place on the American continent. 

The transportation question is one little understood, 
because it has been little studied. The success of the 
Paris Exposition was largely due to its location upon a 
park which had been reserved for military purposes in 
the heart of Paris, and was accessible from populous 
centers by a ten to twenty minutes' walk and by every 
line of transportation in the city. On any important 
day there will be present at the Exhibition at the time 
it closes 200,000 people. It is absolutely essential that 
an exhibition be closed at a specified hour, when the 
curtains are drawn over the booths and the ropes across 
the avenues inside the grounds. Then 200,000 hungry, 
tired, cross people, many with babies and young chil- 
dren, are discharged from the various exits, wild to get 
to their homes and lodging-houses or to catch outgoing 
trains and steamboats. 

A steam railroad, conducting its ordinary business, 
could run every five minutes a train of ten cars, carry- 
ing sixty people each, or 6000 an hour. A cable road 
could do about the same on a headway of two min- 
utes; surface roads not quite so well. It would not 
be possible, in any place where they think of locating 
the Fair in either St. Louis or Chicago, to discharge 
over 25,000 people an hour, and that would take for 
your 200,000 people eight hours. The first day of the 
block would be the last of the Fair. 

The location of New York upon an island makes it 
wonderfully adapted to the easy distribution of large 
masses of people. The Museum buildings in the Ccn- 



532 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

tral Park are in the center of population, and the loca- 
tions outside of the Park will be in easy and near connec- 
tion by electric roads. There are seven lines of horse- 
cars, two lines of elevated roads, and two lines of steam 
railroads connected with the ground. These carry New 
York Central trains to the interior of the State and the 
West, Harlem trains up the territory back of the Hud- 
son, and New Haven, Boston and Albany, and New 
York and New England trains to New England. In 
addition, a twenty minutes' walk, or, with the transpor- 
tation which would be provided, a ten minutes' ride to 
the river on either side, furnishes the piers and docks 
where steamboats and ferries can bear them up and 
down the Hudson, to Staten Island, to Long Island, 
up the Sound and across to Jersey City to the network 
of roads which run out from there to all parts of the 
country. 

Few of the promoters of this great enterprise have 
contemplated the enormous responsibility which the 
city assumes which undertakes to make it successful. 
The French Exposition cost, in round numbers, ten mil- 
lions of dollars. Of this five millions were contributed 
by the Government of France and the city of Paris, 
and four millions raised by a lottery, and the rest by 
the sale of concessions, the grounds being entirely con- 
tributed by the city. With the differences in cost of 
labor and material we must add 30 per cent. It would 
be unsafe to begin a Fair unless at least twelve millions 
of dollars were pledged. So far as I have been able to 
ascertain, Chicago and St. Louis have each about four 
millions which might be called available. New York 
has a guarantee fund of five millions of dollars, sub- 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. 533 

icribed under a contract which is binding upon the sub- 
scribers and their estates. 

The Committee on Legislation have unanimously 
adopted a bill asking the Legislature to authorize the 
city of New York to expend ten millions of dollars in 
buildings and grounds. There is no doubt about this 
authorization. Part of it will go for the completion of 
the Museum of Natural History and of the Museum of 
Art, to the completion of both of which the city is 
already pledged. This will furnish fifty-two acres of 
floor-room in fire-proof buildings. These buildings will 
be connected, through the subway which adjoins them, 
by an electric road, and over it a promenade can be 
built Avhich will present a horticultural garden of un- 
equaled beauty ; while in the grounds north of the 
Park, which comprise Morningside and Riverside Parks 
and lands already promised, there are several hundred 
acres for a machinery hall and such other structures 
as may be required for the purposes of the Exhibition. 
New York, therefore, comes here, not only as the 
metropolis of the country, not only as the gateway to 
the continent, not only with the unequaled location 
where the ships can sail to the docks adjoining the Ex- 
hibition, but with the money pledged which makes 
the Fair an unquestioned success. 

Besides, New York has in her two museums art 
treasures exhibiting the progress of civilization for 
thousands of years, which have cost $5,000,000 and are 
of priceless value. These could not be transported to 
any other place. Then the wealth and opportunity of 
a century have accumulated in New York in private 
collections, treasures gathered from the monuments and 



534 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

tombs of the ancients, from the sales of rare collections 
in Europe and the dispersion of galleries and art treas- 
ures, which, in the aggregate, are not equaled in any 
city in the world. All these, in the fire-proof buildings 
of the Museum of Art, would be available for the pur- 
poses of this Exhibition, to make it a phenomenal 
triumph. 

The Exhibition will be held from May to November. 
During that period at Washington, at St. Louis, at 
Chicago, it is a question of pajamas and palm-leaf fans. 
But an exhibition requires comfortable clothing, and 
the disposition and the physical power to move fast 
and far. St. Louis admits the phenomenal heat of the 
Democratic Convention of 1884, which put an end to 
National conventions being held within her borders. 
Chicago claims that Lake Michigan is her refrigerator 
and her reservoir. While gasping for breath one mid- 
night in the great Lake City, with my pajamas hanging 
on the bed-post, I remarked to my Chicago friend : 
"What is the matter with the refrigerator?" He said : 
"In every well-regulated household there are occasions 
when the hired man neglects to put the ice in the box." 

During the months of July and August the swelter- 
ing foreigner, wishing to see the inhabitants of these 
cities, would find them in New York and the sea-coast 
adjacent. New York has become the largest watering- 
place in the world. The ante-bellum Southerner, if he 
passed the Wliitc Sulphur Springs, went to Saratoga, 
to the White Mountains, to Sharon Springs; but the 
New South comes to New York, where it can drive in 
Central Park, stand on the Brooklyn Bridge on moon- 
light nights, sail up and down the uncqualed Bay and 



CHA UNCE V M. DEPE W. 535 

the unrivaled Hudson, go to Coney Island or Long 
Branch and take a plunge in the surf, and enjcy the 
forty theaters and one hundred concert halls which 
furnish amusement in the evening. 

Twenty-five thousand strangers, fifty thousand at the 
outside, would be the limit of St. Louis. The Repub- 
lican Convention last June in Chicago, which brought 
possibly a hundred thousand, crowded the town to the 
extent of discomfort — I remember it crowded me, — 
while the Centennial of the Inauguration of George 
Washington last April in New York brought there a 
million of visitors, who were amply accommodated 
and made scarcely a visible addition to the enormous 
crowds which are the normal characteristic of the me- 
tropolis. At Coney Island, at Long Branch, at Rock- 
away, at Long Beach, at the innumerable places of 
resort within an hour of the city, a million of people 
can be comfortably accommodated over night, with the 
attractions of surf and air unequaled anywhere else 
upon the coast, and unknown in the interior. The ex- 
hibition fails in one of its objects unless it is educa- 
tional. American artisans, mechanics and working men 
and women can there see the best results in metals, in 
wood and in textile fabrics from the shops and looms 
of the world. Expensive transportation will prevent 
their visiting a fair, but steamships in which they can be 
cheaply carried and housed will bring them from all 
along the Atlantic coast to the gates of the New York 
Fair. 

The Southern Society in New York has more mem- 
bers than there are in any club in any city in the 
South. The Ohio Society of New York numbers more 



536 ORATIONS AND SPEECHES OF 

citizens of Ohio than any club in the cities of that 
State, and has just furnished one of its members to be 
Ohio's next United States Senator. The same is true 
of the Pacific Coast, and of the West and Northwest. 
There are in New York more Irish than in Dubhn, 
more Germans than in any city in Germany save two ; 
and ItaHans enough to make one of the group of cities 
third in population in Italy. New York with her har- 
bor, her Hudson and East rivers, her Brooklyn Bridge 
and Bartholdi Statue of Liberty, her museums, parks 
and theaters, her race-courses and her seaside resorts, 
is alone the most attractive exhibition on the American 
continent. 

Politics have been suggested. The bugaboo of 
Tammany with the tiger's head, the shining teeth, the 
whisking tail and the polished claws stands on a Nation- 
al platform facing the Republican party. Well, I have 
lived all my life right under those claws, and every once 
in a while we pull them. The idea is that some of the 
ten millions or more expenditure which this Fair is to 
create may get into the hands of Tammany, and enable 
it to hold the State of New York during the next four 
years, and to carry it in 1892. But under the bill which 
we have drafted, the expenditure of the money is left 
entirely in the hands of the corporators named in the 
bill now on your desk — 103 men, of whom 60 are Re- 
publicans and the rest are Democrats of all shades. 
But they are all gentlemen of honor and integrity, who 
would assume the responsibilities of this trust as a 
public duty. 

While there has been some chaff and ridicule and 
raillery and pleasantry in the discussion of the claims 



CHA UNCE Y M. DEPE IV. 537 

of Washington and St. Louis, of Chicago and New 
York, I can say for New York that there has been no 
feeling other than the warmest, the kindest and the 
most respectful for those other cities and their ambi- 
tions. We appreciate the public buildings and the un- 
equaled situation of Washington ; the history, the loca- 
tion in the Mississippi Valley and the future of St. 
Louis; and the marvelous growth, expansion and de- 
velopment, not only in commerce and trade, but in all 
the elements which constitute a great city in art and 
culture, of Chicago. 

Wherever the Fair may go, New York, so far as so 
great a city can, will do her best to make it a suc- 
cess. But if this committee will dismiss all claims of 
locality, all efforts to add to the prosperity of a city or 
section, and look at the whole country, its needs and 
opportunities for the World's Fair, and the place where 
the whole country would be most benefited by the 
Exhibition, the decision cannot fail to be New York. 

If the Government should to-day appropriate to 
every family in the United States the money which 
would carry them to one place, with the distinct under- 
standing that they could select no other, the vote, with 
a unanimity unequaled in the expression of desire, 
from Maine to the Gulf, from the Atlantic to the 
Pacific, among farmers, ranchmen, mine-men, mer- 
chants, artisans, professional men, journalists, artists, 
would be "Take me to New York." 

THE END. 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 




lillllillilllllli 
013 763 283 4 



